We care about the true objective of using Educational Robotics at school, which is the student learning and catching of several useful skills that are not only used during school time but also for the entire life time, as problem solving and computational thinking. In this sense we would appreciate comments, and questions and suggestions on how to change the current paradigm of certain regions where Educational Robotics has yet been used with other purposes. There are two major issues here that we would like to remark. The first one is the use of Educational Robotics with marketing purposes or as a service that some companies do to schools that do not want to invest in their teachers in order for them to learn and apply this powerfull techology with their students. The second issue is related to the stress caused by some schools and fathers to the students imputing to them only the win or win condition.
Dear Luiz Marcos G. Gonçalves,
Interesting issues. The development of robotics is increasingly related to the use of robots in education processes in schools. Classes from robotics find a lot of interest among students, because young people are interested in new technologies and see the future in it. These interests are often inspired by literature, film and other fields of art, in which robots are an important element of the plot of a science fiction novel or film. Robotics and other advanced information processing technologies, including artificial intelligence technology, machine learning and the Internet of Things, are finding more and more applications in industry, in commercial business ventures. Therefore, teaching robotics should start at the early stages of the education process for children and adolescents.
Best wishes
Hello
It is a reality and Societies should do law for people
ingrid
Sounds like you are telling us an answer rather than asking a question. I do agree with what you are saying but I'm not sure what you are asking.
Very good point! However, I believe we are talking about two orthogonal issues. On one hand, we are discussing the use of technology that allows integrating multiple concepts and is amenable to experimentation. Despite not being the only case, at all, robotics is particularly good for this purpose because it integrates the constructions of a physical/electronics gadget with its programming, thus developing design capabilities with computational thinking. On the other hand, we discuss the use of competitions to foster the engagement of students in the learning process. Competitions can be organized around many other technologies, not just robotics. Competitions are engaging by nature because of the natural competitiveness of the human being. However, the engagement can, because of that nature, go beyond what can be called healthy or desired levels and pervert the global learning objective, shifting the focus from learning the technical aspects to winning. This affects the students, tutors, parents and everyone involved in the process, leading to many abnormal behaviors (in the sense of behaviors that are undesired). How can we keep competitions under control to avoid this shifting and perversion is an open and significant challenge. Many experiments are being conducted with on-going small and large scale competitions, such as RoboCupJunior, WRO, FLL, etc, many of which successful, others not so much. Maybe we are coming to the right time to look back and assess carefully the huge experiments that were done along the last 20 years!
Interesting and important discussion! I believe that we need to take care of the process conduction (Educational Robotics), in order to provide an environment that promotes education as the central goal, not something commercial (attract students for institutions) or only competition. I have experience with Educational Robotics, where undergraduate students develop Robots and promote competitions focused on coding, E-waste reuse, environmental awareness, and computation thinking. The project is applied in schools, with more than 300 students, in Elementary and high schools. But the most important thing, Robot kits are distributed free of charge to the schools, encouraging and preparing the teachers to insert these practices in the school as soon as possible, aiming at the cultural formation of the people. The student and its formation as people is the most important point.
Best Regards!
That´s the point Luis and Roque (nice to hear from you:-); I don´t think we should go back, however rethink about the true objectives of Educational Robotics helps. We should start defining it, if it is about preparing students to win competitions or about a tool for bringing knowledge to children. Or it might be a mix between them, or both of them, I don´t know. For researchers in Education field, it is for sure about the first definition. To demonstrate that competitions are also healthful, it should be conducted and brought to the community experiences about studying the further behaviors of children that had Robotics competitions at school and those that did not. Of course every one wants to win competitions, what might generate kind of not reational behaviors as you agreed. As so I believe that the benefits of Educational Robotics are not proven yet (at least for the Education researchers). This is an open question. Once we get that proven, then we believe that all people will definitively agree that Robotics in Education is here to add in Education and as so it will be inserted at all levels of school, and not only to make some small groups of children the "winners". It is hard to make children understand that loosing is also good, most of the time.
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