Abstract:

The introduction of Educational Robotics in everyday learning activities at School is a process that has to be designed and carefully calibrated in all its aspects. The process has to be at the same time engaging and captivating with children and bearer of cross-disciplinary or disciplinary learning.

Technological component is only one of the ingredients and the scientific research on new technologies in education has shown that students' best or worst educational results do not depend only on the presence or absence of technology, but above all on the way it is used.

Therefore, attention should not be focused only on the quality and quantity of technologies present in schools, but it has to also focus on the teachers’ training at the use of technologies in order to better improve the learning experience mediated by technologies in the three dimensions of:
1) teaching,
2) learning and
3)evaluating.

In this abstract proposal we are not going to deal with robotics as a discipline, because the study of this subject is left to specific and advanced courses, both for required skills and for possible job opportunities. Instead we will focus on the educational purpose that robotics could have as support to curriculum disciplines and on methods and design approaches of using a robotic mediator (which can be a robot or a system of mechanical and electronic components that interact with each other according to coded instruction protocols) to sustain and improve learning process.

When an educational activity designed for educational robotics is performed, students are personally involved both considering their personal attitudes and their characters. Constant feedback is required and it is often required going on with a re-planning process based on trials and errors iterating for the whole duration of the activity. Active learning approaches are experimented as learning in situation and collaborative learning, but also self-correction, self-evaluation and peer-evaluation.

Educational robotics allows to experiment with teaching approaches aimed at problem solving, collaborative learning, laboratory teaching and discovery teaching.

This contribution tries to answer the following questions: how much and how does educational robotics impact on one's own teaching? With which advantages? Which educational formats and teaching approaches can be adopted?

After a brief introduction on the context and the aims of the observatory, the contribution will focus on investigative methodologies and tools and it will deal with the proposed themes through the results of a qualitative research conducted by Indire researchers with a sample of teachers of the first cycle. The research aims to highlight peculiarities and educational opportunities of educational robotics laboratories, through sets of interviews, observations in classes, testimonies of some of the teachers involved in observations and of the research partners (Municipality of Florence,Terza Cultura soc. coop. Spin-off UNIFI).

Keywords:

Educational Robotics, active learning approaches, technologies, robot.