Research Strategy for the Evaluation of Students’ Success in the Project “Innovative Educational Robotics Strategies for Primary School Experiences”

Abstract

Educational robotics has been used for a relatively long time to promote the development of students’ computational thinking, but in most cases, such activities are offered as extracurricular activities to students who are interested in robotics and programming or in specific study programmes in higher education. Despite the fact that Seymour Papert developed the programming language LOGO to change the way children learn to use technology as early as 1980, this concept is still not widely used in compulsory education. It should be kept in mind that the inclusion of robotics in the learning process can not only contribute to the development of competencies such as programming and the integration of different components, sensors and actuators but also support the learning of mathematics, physics and chemistry in an innovative way. To support the development of innovative solutions for teaching educational robotics to primary school students, the ERASMUS+ project “Innovative Educational Robotics Strategies for Primary School Experiences” (No. 2019-1-IT02-KA201-063073) was launched, aiming to develop a variety of teaching materials for both students and teachers, to create educational robots for two levels of complexity, and to include these activities in the compulsory schooling process for primary school students. In the initial stage, students acquire basic knowledge of robotics, and at the second level of difficulty, the focus is on marine robots. In order to evaluate the results achieved by all these activities, a design-based research model has been developed that uses several complementary research methods, and this paper describes this model, showing how it organizes data acquisition and uses them to improve materials to offer scientifically proven activities.