Abstract

This paper aims to present a case study of an educational robotics curriculum with 4th graders who had difficulty mastering the concepts presented in their 3rd grade educational robotics unit of study. In the previous year, the teachers struggled to trigger student interest in learning through inquiry. An inquiry-based learning approach to learning educational robotics was not as successful for this group of students as it had been in previous years. The students were more passive about their learning than in previous years. They seemed to prefer to follow a teacher-directed line of study, rather than creating their own projects. The children preferred to master teacher created challenges rather than taking a more active role in their learning as evidenced by the generation of their own ideas for robotics creations. We hope that by changing our approach to how skills are reviewed the students will not only be excited by their learning, but also retain and apply newly acquired programming skills to solving challenges of their own creation.

Citation

Eguchi, A. & Uribe, L. (2012). Is Educational Robotics for Everyone? - A case study of a 4th grade educational robotics unit. In P. Resta (Ed.), Proceedings of SITE 2012--Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education International Conference (pp. 4126-4132). Austin, Texas, USA: Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE). Retrieved July 2, 2022 from https://www.learntechlib.org/primary/p/40257/.

Keywords

• robotic
• Robotics