ROBOTICS IN PRIMARY SCHOOL CURRICULUM

The government of the Czech Republic approved in November 2014 Strategy of Digital Education 2020 which defines the priorities in the field of the use of new methods and ways of learning with the support of digital technologies, strengthening of digital literacy and the development of both digital competences and computational thinking of pupils. To fulfil the strategy, there is a necessity to assure the conditions and adjust the curricular documents which are the base of the educational programmes of individual schools. Our survey is aimed to contribute to this process, describe and explore what way and to what degree the work with robotic kits is currently integrated into the lessons at the primary schools in the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

Robotics and robotic programming are not included in the Czech curricular documents. However, there are some primary schools where robotic kits are used in lessons in spite of its unfavourable initial position and hereby robotics has its role not only within leisure time activities. To map the way and range of robotics teaching, Czech primary schools and lower level of grammar schools were addressed by means of the online questionnaire which target group were the teachers of higher primary schools and lower level of grammar schools.

From the obtained responses is evident that robotic kits LEGO Mindstorms are used in Czech schools the most frequently. To be more specific robotic kits are used in technically oriented subjects such as Informatics, Technical Education and Physics, not only in algorithm and programming teaching but also in a variety of further activities. We focused on the school educational programmes of some representative schools to find out how robotics is integrated in lessons despite the absence in the frame educational programme. An interesting point is that despite its absence in the curriculum of primary education, robotic kits are used by the teachers all school year long usually in middle big groups which size is typical for language lessons. From the responses, there are also evident some deficiencies which emerge from the current position of robotics in Czech education, e.g. the absence of sufficient amount of robotic kits and/or an adequate time grant.