Programmable robotics is recently used in early childhood education (ECE) to introduce programming and computational thinking (CT) skills. However, there is a further need for research to contrast the efficacy of children's participation in robot programming and traditionally beneficial ECE activities. The present study thus investigated the…

Teachers' readiness for technology integration depends also on their beliefs about the contribution of technology to teaching and learning, which influence their motivation for its adoption. Initial pre-service teacher education is critical in reducing the attitude-behaviour divide supporting technology acceptability, acceptance and use.…

Constructionism has different meanings for what the learner is constructing, a concrete object or an idea, and whether this construction is done through the use of digital technology. In the embodied-based environment created in this study, children carry out or "construct" a series of actions, a performance, which allows them to solve…

This study explored two different ways for K-12 school teachers to access educational makerspace through virtual fieldtrips. K-12 school teachers from rural areas of the Southeast USA were divided into two groups. The experimental group (n = 48) drove telepresence robots to take their fieldtrip, while the comparison group (n = 23) watched the same…

Research on the educational applications of social robots has shown how they can motivate children and help improve academic learning outcomes. Here, we examine how robots can support skill learning and, more specifically, musical instrument practice. Drawing from social facilitation theory and evaluation apprehension theory we expected that the…

Presenting a pictorial representation followed by a textual representation supports learners to build a coherent mental model. Providing an elaboration prompt stimulates learners to process the learning content semantically. Hence, combining both approaches might result in synergetic effects as both foster mental model development, which could be…

This qualitative case study explores a 6-year-old boy's dialogic appropriation of programmable robots. The study was conducted in two robotics education programs for children aged four to seven. Drawing on Bakhtin's (1981) notion of appropriation, we found that the focal child actively engaged with the programmable robots by (1) transforming the…

Constructionism, long before it had a name, was intimately tied to the field of Artificial Intelligence. Soon after the birth of Logo at BBN, Seymour Papert set up the Logo Group as part of the MIT AI Lab. Logo was based upon Lisp, the first prominent AI programming language. Many early Logo activities involved natural language processing,…

The proliferation of screen-free programmable robotics allows teachers to implement age-appropriate integrated activities that can promote child learning and development. However, very scarce is known about the challenges of using programmable robots as a tool to empower children in minority communities. This mixed-methods case study examined a…

Motivated by mixed evidence on the effectiveness of reading companions on children's reading performance, as well as the clear and present need for libraries to conduct literacy education, this study sought to investigate the feasibility of using social robots in library literacy activities and to extract the essential functions of effective…

The research literature on the topic of "spatial ability" reveals that it has a major influence on achievement in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Additionally, previous studies indicate the existence of a gender gap in spatial ability in favour of males. Mental rotation, one subskill of spatial ability, is…

This study explored how educational robotics (ER) was implemented in classrooms to foster creativity among elementary school students and identified challenges associated with its implementation. Twenty-six teachers at different elementary schools were interviewed. In-depth teacher interviews and grounded theory were used to collect and analyze…

In this study, we explore the potential of a natural language processing (NLP) approach to support discourse analysis of in-situ, small group learning conversations. The theoretical basis of this work derives from Bakhtin's notion of speech genres as bounded by educational robotics activity. Our goal is to leverage computational linguistics…

This qualitative study examines the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics in learning designs from the perspective of learning sciences. The literature on the topic indicates that there is not enough research on including diverse learning outcomes in the designs for learning. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to understand how AI…

This study investigates the acceptance of social robots by higher education students in the social sciences. Pepper, a humanoid social robot from SoftBank Robotics, provided a sample of its capabilities during a first semester, large-scale, university course, "Introduction to academic writing."From this course, 462 freshmen participated…