Exploring Creativity and Sociability with an Accessible Educational Robotic Kit

摘要

This paper presents a pedagogical proposal for Robotic in Education. The approach explores the creative aspects and social consequences of the collective project of robotic devices. A set of steps that compose the proposed methodology was applied to Brazilian schools. A robotic kit available is also presented, allowing its implementation even in schools with low budget. I. I NTRODUCTION New technologies have a big impact in the way modern societies live. For example, the way people communicate is everyday more centered around the internet. Online services like instant messaging, social networks, video streaming, etc have not only allowed for a reinvention of traditional ways of communication but have also created totally new ways of socializing. In a similar way, the education of children in schools has been directly influenced by new technologies. For example, online searches have substituted the traditional encyclopedia researches; projectors and smart boards have taken the place of blackboards; educational video-games have been used to stimulate creativity and curiosity, etc. The use of these technological tools in schools can improve the quality of education and help to prepare students to a technological society. Another technology that has been used in education is robotics. Robotics is the science that studies the creation and programming of machines that perceive and interact with its environment. It is a naturally interdisciplinary field, involving concepts from mathematics, physics, mechanics, electronics, informatics, engineering and psychology. The use of Robotics in Education (RiE) allows students to learn a broad range of concepts through the construction and/or manipulation of robots. It has been successfully applied in several schools worldwide, being used from small kids education (16), (7) to graduate level classes (14). Kids, in special, tend to show a big interest in robots, making it an excellent motivational tool for low grades education. RiE has a great potential to improve education, but there are some open issues that still need to be addressed. In this paper we focus on two main issues: first, as new technologies bring new benefits to our society, it raises an issue of democratic and equal access to these technologies. High costs can make the implementation of RiE in some schools inviable, specially in poor countries, where economical resources for education may be scarce. As education is one of the main factors that can change this reality, it is important to adapt educational technologies to be as accessible as possible, so they can become viable to a broad range of schools. However, most implementations of RiE make use of educational robotic kits developed by private companies, which can be too expensive for some schools, limiting their access to this technology. The second main issue with RiE is that traditional peda- gogical methodologies may not be appropriate to maximize the benefits of RiE. Schools and educators may have to reformulate their existing pedagogical methodologies or create new ones that can explore the full potential of RiE. This change represents a big challenge for educators since it is still not clear which practices are effective to its implementation, managing and evaluation. In this paper, we present two main contributions to the field