Using robotics to foster creativity in early gifted education

Abstract

This paper presents our experiences from workshops with gifted primary school students (grades 2–4) especially in programming with robotics sets (Lego Mindstorms EV3) and other technology. As a part of extracurricular enriched program at the Center for Gifted Child Development in Zagreb, Croatia, we organized a number of robotics and ICT workshops. Main goal of these workshops was to introduce gifted primary school students to computer programming and robotics, teach them some basic programming and mechanics skills, and develop their algorithmic thinking, problem solving and creativity. However, trough lessons, students showed unexpected productive giftedness in specific domains of creativity, with children experimenting with different ideas and designs, discussing inventions or alternative approaches to the given problems, or expressing their visual arts or music talents trough robots and programming tasks.