Scratch day to introduce robotics

Abstract

Scratch Day is made up of a global network of events. Its main goal is to bring people together to celebrate Scratch. Scratch is a free encryption platform that can be used online and offline for children. Scratch Day events bring together young people from the Scratch community. During these meetings, attendees share projects, learn from each other and welcome newcomers. Robotics and computational thinking are ideal tools for developing science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) pedagogy. Currently, innovation and motivation of students during the learning process are promoted by educational robotics tools. Robots are increasingly integrated into our society. To such an extent that robots are becoming more and more common in our everyday environment. This paper presents a workshop which is focused on two main objectives. The first one is to celebrate Scratch Day promoting Scratch locally. On the other hand, this event is aimed to present a robotic educational tool for people as the first step to get into robotics world. This workshop is aimed on those adults who want to discover what possibilities Scratch brings in the introduction to robotics. Throughout this workshop an initiation to Scratch is developed in the context of educational robotics. As the most significant results throughout the workshop, it is clearly demonstrated that Scratch is an ideal tool for children and adults with no previous programming or robotic experience to begin learning both through hands-on experiences. Throughout this work the importance of combining theory and practice is shown in order to include fun tasks intertwined with the challenges of applying theory to problem solving.