Millions of dollars and countless hours of effort have been invested by school leaders and other stakeholders worldwide seeking to increase students' enthusiasm toward science, technology, engineering, and mathematics through educational robotics competitions. The largest of these competitions is the VEX Robotics Competition (VRC). Little research…

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…

Robotics is emerging as an effective strategy for bridging the gap between technology and engineering design in early childhood classrooms (Bers, Seddighin, and Sullivan 2013). Using a science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) grant received from the authors' school, they purchased a KIBO-18 set from KinderLab Robotics…

This paper describes a study of students' meaningful learning of the engineering design process during their participation in robotics activities. The population consisted of middle-school students (ages 13-15 years) who participated in the FIRST® LEGO® League competition. The methodology used was qualitative, including observations and…

When a smart device talks, what should its voice sound like? Voice-enabled devices are becoming a ubiquitous presence in our everyday lives. Simultaneously, speech synthesis technology is rapidly improving, making it possible to generate increasingly varied and realistic computerized voices. Despite the flexibility and richness of expression that…

Knowledge work has become a major component of value creation, especially in industrialized countries. Processing knowledge in virtual ways becomes increasingly possible with emerging technological innovations. This leads to the important question, how to transmit elusive tacit knowledge in a virtual setting. Education at universities benefits…

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and robotics are likely to have a significant long-term impact on higher education (HE). The scope of this impact is hard to grasp partly because the literature is siloed, as well as the changing meaning of the concepts themselves. But developments are surrounded by controversies in terms of what is technically…

This study proposed plugged and unplugged approaches for young students to simultaneously improve their interdisciplinary learning performance in English and Computational Thinking (CT). The plugged approach involved adopting educational robots to enhance CT and to provide English vocabulary and sentence practice via a board game. The unplugged…

A small project of STEAM education called "Innovation for Love and Care" was implemented in a local secondary school in Hong Kong. Four seventh-grade students participated from November 2020 to February 2021. The project aims to integrate humanism into the traditional STEAM curriculum, to stimulate the students' innovation in a…

This article describes an early childhood lesson that integrated science, technology, art, social studies, math, and language. The authors' students compared robots, programmed and created stories with robots, and became robot-inventors. They also imagined how their robot-creations might impact the world--a core idea related to Science, Technology…

Storytelling and drama are well-known teaching tools that can be used throughout the curriculum for the active participation of students in their own learning process. The introduction of robots in storytelling and drama activities provides students with a meaningful, multisensory, hands-on learning experience. This paper explores the potential…

This research was supported within the scope of TÜBITAK-4004 Nature Education and Science Schools Program with Project number 121B899. In this research, it is aimed to evaluate the "Artvin gets Color with Science and Robotics 2" project, which was carried out with 30 secondary school 6th and 7th grade students between 2-8 August 2021…

In this paper the authors explore the implications for higher education of the disruptions caused by changes in the retail sector resulting from rapid developments in technology. Industry 4.0 technologies such as big data, the Internet of Things, blockchain, automation, robotics, artificial intelligence and virtual reality are increasingly evident…

The international "FIRST® LEGO® League (FLL): Challenge" is a popular educational robotics and STEM competition designed to promote primary and early high school students' STEM interests and careers, and twenty-first century skill development. The "FLL Challenge" currently involves over 318,000 students (aged 9-16 years) in…

OECD (2019) defined student agency as the ability to set goals, reflect, and act responsibly to endorse change. It is quality of students' engagement and interaction with peers, teachers, parents and the wider community. The purpose of this research is to investigate and track the factors of promoting student agency and community engagement…