Transdisciplinary invention projects based on traditional and digital fabrication technologies engage young people in designing and making complex artifacts and constitute a central aspect of future-oriented education. In Finland, comprehensive school students (aged 7-15) from all over the country can practice their inventive skills in the annual…

We present a theoretical study that allows us to attempt framing in an embodied perspective the effectiveness of the drawing robot GGBot in the learning of geometry. The aim of the article is to set the intertwining of activity, semiotics, perception, and knowledge at the crossover of Radford's theory of objectification (TO) and Borba and…

While pair learning (PL) is considered a potential method in STEM education including robotics education (RE), the question of how to pair students for superior learning effects remains. Current grouping strategies for PL in RE are constrained by fixed grouping (FG) and short of attention to dynamic grouping (DG). Therefore, this study aims to…

Problem-solving activities have been studied from a diversity of epistemological perspectives. In problem-solving activities, the initial tensions of a problematic situation led to a cognitive dissonance between conflicting motives and instruments to reach the activity goal. We analyze problem-solving in the continuation of Sannino and Laitinen's…

Today, in the era of robotics, different types of educational robots have been used extensively in school classrooms to facilitate teaching activities related to a variety of computer science concepts. Numerous studies have been performed that attempt to examine the effects of using tangible interfaces to enhance collaborative learning…

Understanding the obstacles and causes students faced while learning with new technologies is the key to inform effective instructional designs. To achieve this aim, this study conducted a qualitative video analysis on language learners' observable behaviors when they took part in learning activities supported by the technology of robots and…

This study consists of a 17-year (2006-2021) systematic literature review on the effective instructional strategies for developing Computational Thinking (CT) in primary school students (K-5). The aim of this paper is to identify instructional strategies that have been implemented and evaluated by means of a pre- and post-test, with the aim of…

This research focuses on student-robot interaction in the learning environment of robotics education (RE) and attempts to explore how it cultivates students' computational thinking (CT). Different from child-robot interactions as investigated in the social robot field, student-robot (S-R) interactions focus mainly on the process of interaction…

In the last few years, programming, computational thinking, and robotics are more frequently integrated into elementary education. This integration can be done in many different ways. However, it is still unclear which teaching methods work in which situations. To provide some clarity in this area, we compared two methods of integrating…

This case study focused on the robotics learning process of Mark (a pseudonym), a Latino-American second grader diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. Drawing on Polanyi's (Personal knowledge: towards a post-critical philosophy [Kindle version], 1958/2015) notion of "tacit knowing" and "dwelling in tools," we attempted to…

This study employed a single factor experiment to investigate how different voices from a social robot affect the learning outcomes and motivation of 46 children. The learning motivation for the participants was measured using the ARCS questionnaire, which tested for four subcategories: attention, relevance, confidence, and satisfaction. The…

Computational thinking (CT) has become central to introducing digital artefacts for educational use. However, little is known about implementing CT in the mathematical school curriculum, and many educational staff members have not been introduced to CT in their initial training. Introducing CT in an educational setting calls for interventions that…

Taking place within the Science Through Technology-Enhanced Play (STEP) design-based research project, this paper describes how first- and second-grade students use their bodies to imaginatively become microscopic particles inside of a collaborative simulation of state change (e.g., liquid to gas) and within two distinct play spaces: a…

Aim/Purpose: Although many computer science measures have been proposed, visualizing individual students' capabilities is difficult, as those measures often rely on specific tools and methods or are not graded. To solve these problems, we propose a rubric for measuring and visualizing the effects of learning computer programming for elementary…

This study aims to explore an educational learning environment that supports students to learn conceptual modelling with the unified modelling language (UML). In this study, we call the describing models "UML programming." In this paper, we show an educational UML programming environment for science, technology, engineering, art, and…