A didactical model for educational robotics activities: A study on improving skills through strong or minimal guidance

Abstract

This paper introduces a proposed didactical model for organizing educational robotics activities, addressed to primary and secondary school, and called “CPG+” after Collaboration, Problem, Game - competition, while “+” stands for supplementary teachers’ supportive interventions such as promoting students’ problem solving and computational thinking skills. Then, a study conducted in an elementary school is presented, which was based on the CPG+ model and investigates the development of computational thinking and problem solving skills, focusing on the role of guidance (strong vs. minimal). For developing computational thinking skills we focused on the following basic concepts: abstraction, generalization, algorithm, decomposition, modularity, and debugging. The results show that: (a) educational robotics activities fringed by the didactical model CPG+ can be a vehicle for the development of high order skills, (b) although providing written answers is tiring and boring for students, it is an important learning tool.