University and primary schools cooperation for small robots programming

Abstract

In July 2007, in the Italian northwest region named Piedmont, a number of teachers and school headmasters created a School-Net for k-12 "Educational use of robotics". The School-Net aims at promoting Papert's constructionism in a cooperative environment and at setting up a model of small robots programming activities integrated in standard curricula covered in k-12 school years. The project is based on the cooperation between the School-Net and the Computer Science Department of the Turin University for providing technical competences with mini-languages, designing and implementing program development environments pupils oriented and maintaining a community of practice supporting teachers during their activities with robots. Here we concentrate on primary school activities where educational aspects concerned by using small robots fill a long list with, of course, mathematics but also education to affectivity, creativity, communication, geography and others. Experiences from the project are here described. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.