Discovering Concepts of Geometry through Robotics Coding Activities

Abstract

In recent years, mathematics classrooms in the U.S. and around the world have seen an increasing integration of educational robotics with interest from both students and teachers. Through their robotics coding activities, students in the present study discovered the concepts of special angle pairs in geometry—namely, complementary and supplementary angles—as they learned to navigate the immediate feedback from the robot Sphero SPRK+ into a trial-and-error mathematics problem-solving process. Students’ experiences in these three coding activities revealed, to a certain extent, that engaging in reflective play could be shaped into meaningful teachable moments where students could participate in a “doing with learning” pedagogical method using educational robotics. These activities had transferability implications that might afford STEM learning access and opportunities for students to develop not only mathematical reasoning skills, but also problem solving and critical thinking skills operable to a coding environment. This paper presents students’ use of educational robotics in a school geometry curriculum setting to demonstrate the possibility that mathematics concepts could be gathered and mastered in a playful and informal manner, and that robotics games and computer coding could be performed and framed in a thoughtful and challenging manner.