Lara Lammer

ER4STEM Educational Robotics for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics

Robotics is a popular vehicle to introduce young people to science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) with various approaches worldwide that use robotics to teach or entertain or both, accompanied by various tools and repositories. However, the stakeholders involved have different goals and methods, thus difficulties in finding common ground. E.g. the focus in most cases is on increasing interest in STEM, but research methods are unspecified or vague; or despite the vastness of offerings, teachers are reluctant to incorporate activities in the classroom. In this paper, we introduce the Educational Robotics for STEM (ER4STEM) project that will realize a creative and critical use of educational robotics to maintain children’s curiosity in the world. An open and conceptual framework will bring three main stakeholders of educational robotics—teachers, educational researchers and organizations offering educational robotics—together through a user- and activity centered repository.

The Educational Robotics Landscape Exploring Common Ground and Contact Points

In the last decades, educational robotics has gained increased attention evoking a need to discuss and document different approaches and lessons learned. In this article, we report our findings made during the “Educational Robotics Cafe”, a workshop format where experts engage in an open discussion about opportunities and challenges of the educational robotics landscape as well as advantages and shortcomings of various approaches. Interestingly, participants working on different educational robotics topics with different methods realized that all seemed to have similar problems and experiences. They could define areas of common ground, yet had difficulties in finding contact points between their educational robotics approaches to compare them. Known categorizations seemed not to fit or to be too high level. Based on these findings, we finish our article by suggesting a “tagging” approach to enable better communication between experts from different domains like education or robotics.

The 5-Step Plan: A Holistic Approach to Investigate Children's Ideas on Future Robotic Products

Many educational robotics activities involve children with bottom-up approaches and pre-set robot tasks. However, robotics for education can be much more if used in holistic, non-task deterministic ways, like when children develop design concepts for their favorite robots. The 5-step plan offers a simple yet effective structure for this creative process. Researchers as well as educators can use it to introduce many children to robotics, not only the ones interested in becoming engineers or scientists, while at the same time explore the ideas and needs for a wide range of future robotic products and services from a childrens perspective.

The 5-Step Plan

When children and adults work together as partners throughout the design process in a collaborative and elaborative manner, children come up with a wide range of creative and innovative ideas. The 5-step plan is a holistic approach that empowers children as robotic product designers. Researchers as well as educators can use the approach to introduce children with different interests to robotics and explore their interests, desires and needs regarding interactive technology like robots. In this paper, we describe the 5-step plan and present our findings on children’s robotic product ideas from three case studies.

Mattie: a simple educational platform for children to realize their first robot prototype

The landscape of robotics platforms for education is broad and mainly focused on technical problem solving skills. The different application areas serve for adding some variety regarding skill sets and areas of interest, however design or product development skills are often neglected. Mattie is a simple robotic platform for children to realize their first robotic product ideas. The design is kept very simple. Materials are affordable and easily available. The aim is to guide children to build their first robot prototype from scratch by learning product development and scientific working. The concept around the Mattie robot incorporates different perspectives like product, behavior, marketing or design besides technology and engineering. This way, robotics can appeal to those children who are not interested in engineering or programming right away. We have successfully used the Mattie robot in classroom workshop settings with seven different classes (6th, 7th and 9th grades). The feedback from teachers and students aged 11-18 is very positive.