Towards a Framework for Educational Robotics

Educational robotics has been considered as a field with a good potential to teach difficult concepts (e.g. friction) in appealing way. As a consequence, the interest in educational robotics has grown in the last decade, which is reflected in increasing number of robotic platforms, kits, and programming interfaces now available. Nevertheless, researches still fail on describe activities that could be used by teachers and other people with no technological fluency, who are scared by the overwhelm amount of information that made them avoid the use of robotics to teach. Moreover, most of the activities developed until now do not consider pedagogical methodologies to inform the design and implementation of them. As a direct consequence of the misinformation about the correct use of pedagogical methodologies and robotics' multidisciplinary, the number of people who master the use of robotics in education is still scant. This paper presents ongoing work on the development of a framework in the European project Educational Robotics for Science, Technology, Engineer, and Mathematics (ER4STEM). The framework aims to make evident the connection between 21st century skills, robotics and pedagogical methodologies to support the creation of pedagogical activities, which is defined in ER4STEM as an activity that has clear learning outcomes and evidence of learning, use of one or more pedagogic methodologies during the activity, and detail description of the activity. This is achieve through the critical use of tools and examples of activities developed ER4STEM.