Abstract
This chapter investigates the development of a conceptual and methodological C4STEM framework to assess the learning outcome of educational robotics activities (ERAs) and demonstrates first case study on Virtual Educational Robotics Workshop. Several ERAs are challenges or competitions and are classified in navigational contests, duels, crusades, line follower, micro mouse, or climbing contest. These ERAs use different didactical strategies and methodological tools to teach students programming and CT. The C4STEM offers for a better comparison a template with a didactical approach to identify and share the best of ERAs with the community.
TopIntroduction
The European Commission (2020) reported that one of the aims of the agenda for improving the relevance of skills in the EU was to strengthen sustainable competitiveness by increasing the number of STEM graduates. Despite rising demand, the number of students completing a STEM programme is decreasing (Cedefop, 2014)
Key Terms in this Chapter
Vocational School: A secondary part-time vocational school for apprentices. The students work in company and visit the school one day in the week.
Instructionism-Oriented Part: In this part the teachers have a actively role and provide students resources like information, knowledge, etc.
Activity Block: A activity plan has more than one activity blocks. The activity block contains the information about a activity block code for identify the kind of activity, the duration in minutes, a name of the activity, the activity of students, the activity of teacher and the necessary material.
Constructionism-Oriented Part: In this part, the students have a actively role and produce learning artefacts through problem solving.
C4STEM Framework: A framework with four standardized sectors for proofing and sharing the best of activities with the community; A theoretical framework, an evaluation tool, an activity plan template and activity block template. It contains three factors to impact sustainable the interest in STEM. The factors are motivation during real-life-application, positive relationship with tutors as role model, increasing the robotics-self-efficacy by hands-on-activities and learning by doing.
Robotics-Self-Efficacy-Test: The test measures the robotics-self-efficacy of students before and after the educational robotics workshops. The result means that students with a high Robotics Self-Efficacy Score set more challenging goals and work harder and more efficiently to accomplish goals related to robotics than students with low Robotics Self-Efficacy Score.
Thymio: A small white educational robot for learning programming with VPL, Scratch, Blockly, and text programming.
AVIVA-Model: A didactical model with five phase and both an instructionism-oriented part and a constructionism part.