ROBOTICS FOR EDUCATION. ASPECTS OF TRAINING PRE-SERVICE TEACHERS OF INFORMATICS

Abstract

The current article deals with the urgent problems of introducing such educational discipline as "Educational robotics" into the curriculum of educational institutions. The article also considers the necessity of special training of pre-service teachers of informatics for teaching educational robotics at school and inclusion of a number of specialized educational disciplines, such as "Educational Informatics", "Robotics", "Hardware programming of microcontrollers" into their professional training. Moreover, the text of the article depicts the results of the diagnostic experiment started in 2013 on the basis of the South Ukrainian National Pedagogical University named after K. D. Ushynsky (Odessa, Ukraine) within the framework of the discipline "Programming of microcontrollers". The aforementioned course is taught for students of full-time and parttime studying in the specialty "Secondary Education (Computer Science)". The article highlights the positive aspects of the influence of teaching educational robotics at school and during professional training of pre-service teachers of informatics. In addition, the text highlights the experience of participating in the "Build Your Own AVR JTAG ICE Clone" project, which had been devoted to the study of the AVR JTAG controller. In the framework of the project participants were asked to explore the possibility of simplifying the architecture of this controller. While working on project implementation, we were given the task of making it easier to create an in-circuit debugger. The results of participation in this project were extended and continued in the framework of scientific degree work of students in the scientific direction "014 Secondary Education (Informatics)". According to the goals and objectives of the international project, taking into account the experience of working on the project "Build Your Own AVR JTAG ICE clone", the experience of cooperation with the NANITES Group and taking into account own pedagogical and methodological experience in accordance with the training needs and market demand in the framework of MoPED: Modernization of Pedagogical Higher Education by Innovative Teaching Instruments 586098-EPP-1-2017-1-UA-EPPKA2-CBHE-JP implementation we have created a program of educational discipline "Educational Robotics" which structure is described in the article.