Abstract:

One of the main drivers of robotics in education are programmable robotics construction sets. Among them, the long-term popularity in the schools remains with the LEGO robotics sets. Their versatility, universality, and long-lasting quality is now proven by decades. They provide a full-range of robotics experience - from mechanics, through sensor and motor control, to programming and data representations. In fact, we are still regularly using also the sets produced about 15 years ago with both students at our faculty and pupils in elementary school. The sets are often successfully used for introducing robotics, and computational thinking. They are also excellent tools for constructivist and constructionist learning and project based learning. What is still overlooked and remains for an intensive research and didactic work is making the sets more ready for the interdisciplinary scenarios, which are attracting an increasing attention while the school systems in various countries are still being transformed to better serve the pupils in preparing them for the ever changing world. What we mean here is using the sets in other subjects, such as Physics, Mathematics, English, Biology, Art, and others. In the previous work, we have studied the ideas of using the new robotics sets in the settings of physics class, and we have shown a set of activities that can be directly taken to a classroom. The focus of this article is to build up on that work and describe a set of exercises for using the sets to teach mathematics - summarizing our previous experiences, collecting experiences of others, and providing a unifying view.

Keywords:

Spike Prime, LEGO robotics sets, mathematics.