STEM areas (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) are continuously growing, but the number of technical workers does not accompany that growth. As the 21st century has brought new challenges, students should be prepared for increasingly complex life and work environments that will privilege proficiency in Learning and Innovation Skills that include Creativity and Innovation, Critical Thinking and Problem Solving, Communication and Collaboration [Framework for 21st Century Learning, 2017]. Also, the need to continuously explore new pedagogical practices in teaching and learning creates an opportunity to shape new contents by balancing a stable and tested curriculum with new tools that stimulate creativity, allowing students to understand better the world they live in. This project will develop a low-cost mobile robotic kit aimed at children and adolescents from 10 to 13 years of age, designed to work as an interdisciplinary teaching tool that can be applied directly to a curriculum, promoting students' technical skills and allowing them develop new skills like Computational Thinking and Problem Solving, driven by the motivation created by a Robotics Competition. The methodology will consist of developing a collaborative training plan for the teachers involved in the project. Then a training course will also be made based on the plan developed by all partners and will be put into practice with these teachers. During the training process, it is intended that interventions in an educational context may be the object of collaborative reflections that respond to the project objectives. Then, teachers will apply what they have learned with their students, analyse their pedagogical practices, reflect and share with the partners. During the course planning and execution, the partners will create teaching and learning toolkits explaining the new robotic kit and with activities and pedagogical practices with innovative educational scenarios for teachers and students. The partnership will also have a book that reports the teachers' experiences and students' perceptions on their pedagogical practices during the process. The importance of transnationality is mainly related to the richness that the diversity of pedagogical practices already existing in each of the countries involved can bring to all partners in this project. It is also believed that experiencing this new teaching methodology in such differentiated places will create per se a unique set of challenges and opportunities in each context that can be so enriched by the group that the application of the model becomes more effective in all contexts. The personal, cultural and linguistic richness that will be brought to all actors directly or indirectly involved is also evident, providing a highly enriching personal and academic growth/development.
The main goals of the project were to create a mobile robotics kit aimed at children and adolescents from 10 to 13 years of age that could be used as an interdisciplinary teaching tool that can be applied directly to a curriculum. T This it, alog with the other outputs with innovative educational scenarios for teachers and students, allowed the partners and every school that follows the footsteps, to promote students’ 21st century essential skills, to develop new skills like Computational Thinking and Problem Solving by using Robotics Competition as motivation for learning. Another objective was to improve communication in foreign language, namely, in english, the project's language.
This project was created to develop a low-cost mobile robotic kit aimed at children and adolescents from 10 to 13 years of age, designed to work as an interdisciplinary teaching tool that can be applied directly to a curriculum. The idea behind this robotic kit was to promote students' technical skills and allowing them to develop new skills like Computational Thinking and Problem Solving, driven by the motivation created by Robotics Competitions. There was an urgent need related to robotics in schools and the costs of it. Robotics kits from big manufacturers cost too much for schools to be able to invest. On the other hand, if you decide to invest in low-cost robotics kits, usually you get a set of parts, and then you, as a teacher have to imagine what to do with them. This was a problem that emerged from meetings between partners, before the beginning of the project.