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, t
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Abstract 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. Keywords Educational robotics
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L. Lammer (✉) ACIN Institute of Automation and Control, Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, Austria e-mail: [email protected] W. Lepuschitz PRIA Practical Robotics Institute, Vienna, Austria e-mail: [email protected] C. Kynigos Educational Technology Lab, University of Athens, Athens, Greece e-mail: [email protected] A. Giuliano AcrossLimits Limited, Hamrun, Malta e-mail: [email protected] C. Girvan Cardiff University, Cardiff, Wales, UK e-mail: [email protected] © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2017 M. Merdan et al. (eds.), Robotics in Education, Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing 457, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-42975-5_9
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1 Introduction Robotics is a popular vehicle to introduce young people to science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) with various approaches worldwide. The most common aims of these activities are either the teaching of robotics and STEM subjects or invoking young people’s interest in STEM fields and careers [1]. Consequently, various stakeholders are involved; e.g. teachers looking for interesting ways to teach their subjects, researchers developing pedagogically informed activities to foster certain skills, robotics enthusiasts offering fun and play, or educational technology developers commercializing different tools. In the current situation in Europe, the difficulty presents itself not so much in the quality of the different offerings but rather on, firstly, evaluating their impact, and secondly, bringing different stakeholders together for synergies. As a consequence, the main stakeholder—the young people—is lost out of sight; e.g. many activities engage already interested young learners but fail to attract others, technology has become more important than the learning activity or educational robotics schedules are fragmented and touch young learners only once if at all (e.g. [2, 3]). There is a pressing need to exploit the multidisciplinary poten
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