robotics-and-early-years-stem-education-the-botstem-framework-and-activities

Andreas Redfors, Ileana M. Greca Dufranc, Eva M. García Terceño, Marie Fridberg, Björn Cronquist
2020 European Journal of STEM Education  
botSTEM is an ERASMUS+ project aiming to raise the utilisation of inquiry-based collaborative learning and robots-enhanced education. The project outputs are specifically aimed to provide in-and pre-service teachers in Childhood and Primary Education and children four-eight years old, with research-based materials and practices that use integrated Science Technology Engineering Mathematics (STEM) and robot-based approaches, including code-learning, for enhancing scientific literacy in young
more » ... dren. This article presents the outputs from the botSTEM project; the didactical framework underpinning the teaching material, addressing pedagogy and content. It is a gender inclusive pedagogy that makes use of inquiry, engineering design methodology, collaborative work and robotics. The article starts with a presentation of the botSTEM toolkit with assorted teaching practices and finishes with examples of preliminary results from a qualitative analysis of implemented activities during science teaching in preschools. It turns out that despite perceived obstacles that teachers initially expressed, the analysis of the implementations indicates that the proposed STEM integrated framework, including inquiry teaching and engineering design methodologies, can be used with children as young as four years old. Greca Dufranc et al. / Robotics and early-years STEM education -botSTEM 2 / 13 © 2020 by Author/s and middle school grades show negative attitudes towards the enjoyment of science lessons (Ali et al., 2013; DeWitt and Archer, 2015) . Therefore, pre-primary and primary education stages constitute great opportunity for smoothing the way, and help generate positive attitudes to STEM. The ERASMUS+ project Robotics and STEM education for children and primary schools (botSTEM) with partners in Spain (coordinators), Sweden, Italy and Cyprus that is reported on here, has developed a didactical framework for integrated STEM activities involving robotics for preschool and primary schools (children four-eight years old.). The project outputs are specifically aimed to provide in-and pre-service teachers in Childhood and Primary Education with a didactical framework and research-based and tested robotics activities designed to scaffold STEM-teaching. This article aims to present the project output and starts of by presenting the developed theoretical framework for the botSTEM integrative STEM approach. Then the process of searching for and collecting tested robotics practices, which have been, together with the developed framework, the basis for the development of new robotics activities is described. One example of the practices developed within botSTEM is presented in Appendix A. Finally, the research framework for ongoing implementation of botSTEM activities is described with some preliminary results given from qualitative analysis of implemented activities during STEM teaching scaffolded by robotics in preschools.
doi:10.20897/ejsteme/7948 fatcat:uikb6ygzqncwtbqsxuh2cck2je