Abstract:

In recent years, not only in European countries, there have been major curricular reforms in education. The changes concern many areas - both humanities and technical. Above all, the emphasis on increasing digital competencies in children, young people and adults should be mentioned. They use digital devices not only for entertainment, but also for work and education. They encounter them every day and at every turn. Today's citizens simply cannot imagine everyday life without digital devices. They use their mobile phone to call wherever they need to go, their laptop or computer to order food or any other goods, etc. In this case, however, we are talking about adults. Before children can do this, there are many pitfalls that they will have to overcome in order to learn how to use the various digital devices effectively. In order to overcome all these obstacles, it is essential to develop their digital competencies from an early age.

One way to develop digital competencies in young children is to use robotic toys in the classroom. Our aim is to present all the possibilities of integrating Bee-bot and Blue-bot robotic toys into teaching in preprimary and primary education.

"The Bee-bot seems to be an ordinary toy; however, it is a toy with didactic use, thus reflecting Comenius's motto "school through play". We see it with children in preprimary and primary education and it is used for non-violent teaching of algorithm development, while its principle and use are very important for children. The ability to think ahead is a preparation for everyday life and by acquiring that ability, it is easier to solve problems. Bee-bot is a popular didactic toy in preprimary and early primary education."

A higher and slightly smarter version of this robotic toy is the Blue-bot. It comes with Bluetooth and other accessories or apps.

The aim of this paper is to present educational materials and methodology for teachers, which contains ideas, activity suggestions and teaching examples that serve to develop digital competencies, but also to develop other intellectual abilities of the child, such as imagination, perception of space and time, creativity, or to develop algorithmic and computational thinking.

In addition to the developed methodology, the children's behavior in the lessons was recorded by observation and not only the difficulty of the learning activities was assessed, but also the difficulty in terms of organizational forms. Increased activity and cooperation was observed in children even in a longer time frame. Many teachers were surprised by the number of functions that robotic toys have and most often mentioned the possibility of getting more space for individual work with children as an advantage.

Keywords:

Bee-bot, Blue-bot, algorithms, algorithmic thinking, computational thinking, digital competencies.