Bringing an educational robot into a basic education math lesson

Abstract

The teaching practices of STEAM subjects, especially mathematics, need to be modernized in order to successfully prepare today’s students for the future jobs. Using technology, in particular educational robotics, is considered as one of the ways of meeting this demand. While there are several studies that explore the effects of robot-supported teaching on students’ math learning outcome, these studies do not give us a clear picture of what would be the prerequisites and the outcome if regular math teachers would use robot-supported teaching as a supplementary part of the regular curriculum during a longer period of time. The authors of this paper are currently conducting a multi-stage research on this topic in Estonia. The paper describes the design of the research’s first stage, including the overview of the practical problems of designing lesson plans for robot-supported teaching in regular classrooms and of our experience in solving these problems. Finally, the outlines of the main problem areas and further recommendations are discussed.