Editorial: Educational robotics as a tool to foster 21st century skills

Abstract

Educational robotics (ER) has gained interest in the last years also because ER is seen as a valuable 15 didactic tool to prepare pupils for a digital society and provide them with the necessary skills that an 16 active citizenship requires (Alimisis, 2013). Different studies highlighted how ER can promote the 17 acquisition of such skills such as computational thinking (CT) and digital literacy in general 18 (Atmatzidou & Demetriadis, 2016) as well as to enhance transversal competences such as problem-19 solving (Gratani et al., 2021), creativity (Yang et al., 2020), communication (Nelson, 2012) and 20 collaboration (Gueorguiev et al., 2018). There has been several attempts worldwide to promote ER in 21 schools (Kyriazopoulos et al., 2021 present a study where a simple robot is used to promote CT. The authors present the robot, how it 56 works, and some activities that can be implemented in the educational context to promote CT skills.