Facilitating Learning Activities for Students With Disabilities Using Educational Robotics

Abstract

The teaching of programming and its basic concepts, even to students with disabilities, has a crucial influence on the development of their cognitive functions and blends class lessons with real life. This chapter describes two activities with educational robotics, performed at a school for special needs. In the activities, the students with physical disabilities could nicely operate a wheelchair without bumping into the classmates and dance with moving hands powerfully while expressing the images of the songs; those with intellectual disabilities could learn words describing directions like right, left, go, and back and clarify how many steps the robot could take to reach the destination. These two classes with education robotics provided them with joyful and skillful activities that were quite different to the daily lessons in the existing subjects, and they would benefit from the opportunity to learn additional life skills that are highly applicable to living within society.