Abstract:

Robotics is an area that has been increasingly arousing the interest of children and adolescents, fuelled largely by science fiction films and contemporary games. Therefore, this issue intensifies its application in education itself, where the students see themselves in what they build with collaborative work, seeking to promote in their actions the freedom to learn and research.

From this perspective, the Robotics at School program of the Municipal Government of Recife provides educational elements to involve the students, since the practice with simple machines and the assembly of robots from commercially available projects to the development of their own humanoid robot from basic components of mechanics, electronics and computer programming.

For this, we created three educational lines of projects to develop all the necessary skills. Line one, directed at students of the Final Years of Elementary Education, involves Mechanics and Electronics tools, as well as elements of Free Robotics Programming and Metarecycling. Line two covers Assembly from Interlocking Standardized Parts, where we adopted the full range of kits and educational materials from Lego, which made possible the standardized development in all school groups, from the age of two (Child Education) up to the Final Years of Elementary School. Line three, called Advanced Robotics, makes use of Humanoid Robots ready for advanced programming and robots-humans interaction projects.

Faced with the objective of consolidating the pedagogical actions in these three lines of Robotics implemented in public schools in Recife, the Introduction to Robotics course was offered in four of the five schools full-time, ensuring spaces for interaction and online collaboration between elementary school students. The research instruments were direct and indirect observations, structured questionnaires for students, as well as audio and video records. This course aims to build interaction tools in an online learning environment, available in the Moodle platform, for learning with robotics; to provide spaces for collaborative activities for the production of knowledge focused on multidisciplinary learning with robotics in different schools; to develop a culture of online collaborative production, aimed at the popularization of practices, research and construction of puzzle robotics; and to create a network of collaborative development groups in schools managed by the Secretariat of Education of Recife, aimed at the network-based construction of Humanoid Recife.
In this context, this study aims to present the results of a research applied to the virtual learning environment, which included didactic elements of appreciation of hypertext structure, videos, "podcasts", game challenges and evaluative instruments. The intention is to verify if the use of robotics in basic education has any impact on teaching, learning and creative research in schools, given that so far some students have participated in major tournaments, including the participation in the World Robotics Olympics, in Sochi, Russia, representing Brazil, and the Brazilian Robotics Olympics.

Keywords:

Robotics, Pedagogical Innovations.