Pilot Experience: Play and Program with Bee-Bot to Foster Computational Thinking Learning in Young Children

Abstract

This document presents some results obtained in the development of the pilot experience "My first steps in robotics". The activity is part of a doctoral research aimed at promoting programming skills and computational thinking through robotics in the early stages of school. In the formative experience participated teachers and students of pre-school education from a school in Salamanca, Spain, during the academic year 2016-2017. The proposed activities were based on solving problems through programming challenges with the Bee-Bot® robot. In order to collect data, questionnaires, rubrics, field diaries and interviews were used. The results show teachers and students favorably accepted the robotics resource used and the learning activities. In the same way, the performance achieved by the students marked a favorable level according to the evaluation scale used. Therefore, the development of the pilot experience was effective and useful in strengthening the research activities that were subsequently carried out.