Fostering computational thinking and environmental awareness via robotics in early childhood education: A scoping review

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has been proven to be an important vector in humanity's behavioral reshaping, reflecting on people's value systems regarding sustainable consumption, and environmental awareness. At the same time, the inevitable lockdown brought out the demand for designing innovative educational and assessment strategies, oriented toward digital technology. However, even before the COVID-19 pandemic, digital technology had already been infused in contemporary educational settings, while its undeniable effect on the future of the forthcoming generations had already entailed the necessity of developing today's students' digital competencies and computational thinking (CT) skills in order to equip them for a new reality in the job arena. Especially in early childhood, implementing interdisciplinary education, exploiting state-of-the-art technological tools, and adopting engaging educational practices, like robotics, support the cultivation of core 21st-century skills, such as CT and environmental awareness. Directly responding to these considerations, we provide the results of a scoping review conducted in April of 2023, following the PRISMA statement, aiming at bringing out studies regarding educational practices in early childhood education that concurrently cultivate CT and environmental awareness via robotics. The findings of the literature indicate that this field remains direly underinvestigated.