Abstract
Educational robots are increasingly being used in schools as learning tools to support the development of skills such as computational thinking because of the growing number of technology-related jobs. Using robots as a tool inside the classroom has been proved to increase motivation, participation and inclination towards STEM subjects at both primary and secondary levels; however, language has usually not been considered as a mitigating factor. This paper reports our experience delivering nine workshops in English, using Thymio robots, to over two hundred students aged 9–12 across a week in the French cities of Nancy and Metz. Our goal was to test whether students would still have fun, learn something new and gain an interest in STEM even when the workshop was conducted in a foreign language. Our results indicate that using language that is easy to understand, although foreign, has a strong direct correlation (p \(\sim 10^{-3}\)) with having fun and that the latter positively affects learning and increased interest in STEM.
D. Carrillo-Zapata, C. Lee, K. M. Digumarti — These authors contributed equally to the work.
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Notes
- 1.
Material used in the workshops including the presentations, worksheets, questionnaire participant responses are accessible at https://caidin.brl.ac.uk/k2-digumarti/data-for-rie2019-carrillo-zapata.
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Acknowledgement
DCZ, CL and KMD would like to thank Mireia Bes-Garcia, Chloe Anderson, Ellie Cripps, Katie Winkle, Carole Hemard, Irene Daumur, Elisabeth Pirlot and all the schools staff involved for their help during the project. This work was supported by the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Future Autonomous and Robotic Systems (FARSCOPE, grant EP/L015293/1) at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory where DCZ, CL and KMD are PhD students. Financial help was provided by the University of Bristol Public Engagement Seed Fund. The activity was conducted for the Science in Schools program of the Bristish Council in France and the rectorat de l’académie de Nancy-Metz. The authors would like to disclose that they received a discount on the purchase of Thymios from Mobysa.
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Carrillo-Zapata, D., Lee, C., Digumarti, K.M., Hauert, S., Boushel, C. (2020). Lessons from Delivering a STEM Workshop Using Educational Robots Given Language Limitations. In: Merdan, M., Lepuschitz, W., Koppensteiner, G., Balogh, R., Obdržálek, D. (eds) Robotics in Education. RiE 2019. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 1023. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26945-6_25
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