Abstract
There are many necessities that need to be improved in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) education. The robotics represents a promising educational tool. Nowadays, robotic education tools arise with the aim of promoting the innovation and the motivation of the students during the learning process. Robots are becoming more common in our daily life; thus, it is important to integrate robots at all levels of our society. The aim of this paper is to present the use of Scratch - a widely-used tool - in order to guide educational robotics as the first step in introducing students into robotics. The robotics requires several skills such as systems thinking, programming mindset, active learning, mathematics, science, judgement and decision making, good communication, technology design, complex problem solving and persistence. These skills can be easily developed using Scratch. The obtained outcomes from the educational robotic course demonstrate how children without previous experience in programming or robotics can start learning both through experiences in the classroom. The result of this work shows that it is better to make very easy challenges, to adapt the difficulty to each of the children. Furthermore, it is necessary to develop previous concepts. Moreover, it is necessary to work the design, instead of programming directly. Additionally, it is important to combine theory and practice with the aim of including fun tasks intertwined with the challenges that are posed to apply theory in problem solving.
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Acknowledgment
The authors acknowledge the support provided by the Engineering Industrial School of UNED, the Doctorate School of UNED, and the “Techno-Museum: Discovering the ICTs for Humanity” (IEEE Foundation Grant #2011-118LMF).
And the partial support of the eMadrid project (Investigación y Desarrollo de Tecnologías Educativas en la Comunidad de Madrid) - S2013/ICE-2715, IoT4SMEs project (Internet of Things for European Small and Medium Enterprises), Erasmus+Strategic Partnership nº 2016-1-IT01-KA202-005561), mEquity (Improving Higher Education Quality in Jordan using Mobile Technologies for Better Integration of Disadvantaged Groups to Socio-economic Diversity), Erasmus+Capacity Building in Higher Education 2015 nº 561727-EPP-1-2015-1-BG-EPPKA2-CBHE-JP, PILAR project (Platform Integration of Laboratories based on the Architecture of visiR), Erasmus+Strategic Partnership nº 2016-1-ES01-KA203-025327, the GID2016-17 Remote Electronics Practices in the UNED, Europe and Latin America with Visir - PR-VISIR G-TAEI Research Group and the Research Project 2017 IEQ 17 Industrial Communications Networks. School of Industrialists UNED.
The authors are also thankful to La Estera due to their collaboration.
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Plaza, P. et al. (2018). Scratch as Educational Tool to Introduce Robotics. In: Auer, M., Guralnick, D., Simonics, I. (eds) Teaching and Learning in a Digital World. ICL 2017. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 715. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73210-7_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73210-7_1
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