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With the challenges of the new demands for competencies in science, technology, engineering, and innovation in the 21st century, new pedagogical currents have arisen that advocate implementing literacy beyond digital literacy, technological literacy. Today we are going to look closer at the phenomenon and purpose of robots in the educational process.
Let's start from the very beginning.
Etymologically, the word Robot is related to the Gothic word "Arbaiths," which means work, labor, trouble. An equivalent German word is "Arbeit," meaning work, and the equivalent word in Old Slavic is "Rabota." In Czech and Polish, "Robota" means servitude or forced labor.
It was first used by the Czechoslovak playwright Karel Capek (1890-1938) in his play Rossum's Universal Robots (RUR) in 1920.
What is robotics?
Robotics is the science involved in the design, manufacture, and use of robots. On the other hand, a robot is a machine that can be programmed to interact with objects or people to perform specific tasks and even mimic certain human or animal behaviors.
Until relatively recently, society generally made robots to perform complicated or dangerous tasks for humans and in areas where the speed and precision of automated mechanisms surpassed human skills.
Nowadays, robotics is evolving by leaps and bounds and is giving way to developing a series of disciplines that would have been unimaginable a few years ago, such as robotic surgery. In this case, the clear objective of robotic surgery is to improve the health of human beings. To this end, it carries out a series of highly complex surgical interventions that require great precision. In this way, using robots, they manage to eliminate some risks and perform surgeries that would not be possible with human hands' accuracy.
As in the field of surgery, certain robots are being created to make life easier for disabled or older people or in the area of rescue or emergency operations.
Humanoid robots such as Pepper with artificial intelligence, which have a learning capacity of 20 years, are also starting to be created. The latest model is Atlas, a robot from Boston Dynamics, which learns household tasks.
Robots today can be seen as a set of automated mechanisms capable of performing the type of task they have been created. For this reason, a discipline that has had great success in recent years is industrial robotics, whose attention is focused on the design and construction of robots that increase the speed of the various production processes and increase the quality of products.
Mechanical engineering has made several significant advances in the construction of motors, transmission systems, and hydraulic systems, which, together with computer technology development, have contributed to the construction of the robots used today.
The construction of today's robots involves two fundamental aspects:
This fact opens up a new discipline, Educational Robotics.
What is Educational Robotics?
The purpose of educational robotics is to exploit students' desire to interact with a robot to promote cognitive processes. Martial Vivet proposes the following definition of educational robotics:
It is the activity of conception, creation, and implementation, for pedagogical purposes, of technological objects that are very faithful and meaningful reduced reproductions of the robotic processes and tools used daily, especially in the industrial environment.
Educational Robotics is mainly focused on creating a robot with the sole purpose of developing in a much more practical and didactic way the motor and cognitive skills of those who use them. In this way, it is intended to stimulate interest in hard sciences and to motivate healthy activity. It also helps the child achieve group organization, discussions to develop social skills, respect everyone's turn to speak, and learn to work as part of a team.
To begin with, I must say that there is no single definition. And its versatility is probably the reason for this. There will be those who emphasize its impact on the facilitated learning of mathematical, physical, electronic, and computer science topics. But some also emphasize the development of creativity or group work.
However, there is consensus in defining it as a multidisciplinary learning environment where the child learns strongly motivated by creating deconstructions where they can put their stamp by working in a group with values.
Robotics in the industrial field expresses the synthesis of humankind's scientific development starting with simple machines (structures, levers, wheels, inclined plane, gears, and pulleys), continuing with complex motorized devices, and later automated through the computer-based control and automation software. Robotics is multidisciplinary, hence its use as an articulator of significant learning, going from the concrete to the abstract, always taking into account the development of values when working in a team.
Therefore, educational robotics is a discipline whose purpose is not to turn the student into a robotics expert but to favor the development of competencies such as creativity, initiative, and research interest. It may help them write a wowessay or more detailed researches in their future learning path.
Until relatively recently, one task that we could not entrust robots with was teaching. At most, we used them as tools to help us transmit knowledge about some particular areas, such as electricity, electronics, mechanics, and in particular programming.
Since 2015, a Korean university has taught its first class with a humanoid robot called "Xiaomei." In Spain, they have NAO. It is currently being used as an educator in food or awareness campaigns, mainly with children. Nowadays, we find programming programs that children can use from 3 years old and upwards, some of them supported by robots and without external support. They are aimed at developing so-called "computational thinking."
What is it anyway?
In other words, computational thinking is the process that we can all use to formulate problems so that their solutions can be represented as sequences of instructions and algorithms.
Computational thinking is the process of recognizing aspects of computing in the world around us and applying the tools and techniques of computing to understand and reason about both natural and artificial systems and processes. This is not to say that only computer scientists can use these tools to solve such problems.
An interesting initiative regarding the definition of computational thinking is the one promoted by the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) and the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA). They have created an operational definition that accurately describes its essential characteristics and offers a framework and a common vocabulary with which all education professionals can work, regardless of the sector in which they work. They define Computational Thinking as a problem-solving process that includes (but is not limited to) the following characteristics:
The fundamental objective is to promote the development of computational thinking from an early age through the programming of video games, at all school stages, from early childhood education to adult education.
However, it is possible to develop computational thinking in our students from any discipline and using other educational resources, not only through programming.
Through Computational Thinking and problem-solving, we can develop a series of skills in our students.
These skills are supported and enhanced by a series of dispositions or attitudes - essential dimensions of Computational Thinking. These dispositions or attitudes include:
