Abstract:

By means of educational robotics, several types of knowledge and skills, that become a necessity for productive life in the 21st century, are developed in children. For example, problem solving skills, programming skills, communication and collaboration skills, creativity, etc.

In our research, we focused on how children aged 8-9 years work with the LEGO WeDo 2.0 robotic kit. Together with Taiwanese researchers, we have conducted a pilot study in parallel, where we examined both how a child at that age works with the software to control a selected robotic model and also the differences in the approach of Slovak and Taiwanese children when working with the software and the LEGO WeDo 2.0 kit.

Within a framework of our pilot study, we have conducted case studies in both countries separately with boys and girls who had no prior experience with educational robotics or programming. We focused on how the child solves the problems that are being raised, but also on what tasks she manages to solve without any problems or intuitively. We also focused on the gender problem: we explored the differences between the work of girls and boys while solving the same task.

We have prepared an activity where the child should first build a robotic model according to the instructions, then pair it with the software in the tablet, and afterwards program its behavior according to the tasks the researcher has explained her verbally. For example, the child was supposed to make the robotic model move, stop it, change the direction and speed of movement. The task to gradually increase the model's speed was proven the most complex one.

The activity was conducted in a constructivist spirit. The researcher let the child examine on her own first. In case when the child was not able to solve a task, the researcher did not immediately showed the solution but she asked auxiliary questions instead, trying to guide the child on the way of solving the problem. In some moments, this meant giving the child an additional auxiliary sub-task. As a final task, a child should create a program according to her own ideas and explain it to the researcher.

In the research, we used qualitative methods of data collection and analysis. The process of the activity, as well as the interviews before and after the activity, were recorded on a video which was analyzed by qualitative methods later on. The interviews were transcripted and coded. In the end, we compared the results of the analyzes of Slovak and Taiwanese children work, and confronted also the work of the opposite genders.

Children did not have problems solving such tasks as, for example, building the model according to the instructions, adjusting the robotic model's direction of motion and detecting the lowest or highest model speed. The software for controlling the kit seemed to be not very intuitive to children. The biggest problems emerged, for example, when dragging command icons from the command bar, or swapping commands icons in an already created program. After finishing the activity, however, children stated they would be able to solve the same problems without problems in the future. They also declared they would be glad to solve similar tasks again.

Keywords:

Educational robotics, children, programming education, LEGO WeDo 2.0, comparative study.