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This paper reports a case study, developed in K-12 Portuguese Education, that aimed to analyze the computer science teachers' knowledge, interest, and self-confidence to use educational robotics and other programable objects in classroom activities to teach computer science concepts and to promote students' computational thinking skills. The research design was organized into a descriptive and exploratory quantitative approach. The participants were 174 in-service computer science teachers of Portuguese public education. The data was gathered from the participants, through the online application of the Robotics Interest Questionnaire scale (RIQ). Very positive levels of teacher's knowledge, interest, and self-efficacy to use educational robotics for teaching purposes were reported in the study outcomes. These constructs were underlined in several studies as relevant factors to promote the use of educational robotics and other similar technologies by the teachers. Despite the study limitations and the small context, a set of relevant results was highlighted on computer science in-service teachers' interest and preparation to use robotics and to support their students in learning activities with these artifacts.

Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) entered the general lexicon in the United States within the last ten years. Both Presidents Obama and Trump emphasized STEM education as a priority for the United States because the number of college graduates with STEM degrees is perceived as an important factor contributing to the global competitiveness of the United States. STEM refers to four disciplines but the acronym is generally interpreted to mean science or math rather than technology or engineering because only science and mathematics are included oftentimes in the school curriculum. In this paper, we describe our attempts to teach integrated STEM units to grades 3-8 students based on five different articles. The first two articles describe how we engaged grades 3-5 elementary students, in two different engineering design challenges (soda can crusher design and trash grabber design) by using our engineering design model. The third article summarizes how we taught epistemological aspects of engineering using picture books within an engineering design challenge. The fourth article illustrates how students in groups of two or three created biomimetic robots with coding. The fifth article details how students built an animatronic zoo showcasing a particular biome and animals living in it by using computational thinking. [Note: The year (2019) shown on the PDF is incorrect. The correct year is 2021.]

"Future Girls of STEM" is a university-sponsored, summer camp outreach program that was designed and implemented by an all-female faculty group to increase young girls' interest in pursuing future careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). This paper discusses the logistics and results of the pilot Future Girls of STEM camp, which was held in the summer of 2019 for seven to twelve-year-old girls. The four-day summer camp featured female engineers from local industry, who shared personal stories of their careers and helped campers work through engineering and leadership activities. Researchers assessed whether completing the activities increased participants' understanding of, interest in, and self-efficacy in engineering topics, majors, and careers. Results showed an increased interest and self-reported understanding of engineering topics after participants completed the camp, as well as high self-efficacy throughout the camp experience. The Future Girls of STEM program, and its hands-on, interactive activities, can be transferred to other locations or universities with varying resources available.

This conceptual paper explores the pedagogical implications of educational robotics (ER) in management education. Premised on Vygotsky's social constructivism, this paper conceptualizes ER as a stimulus for serving dual roles, as a pedagogical means and as a learning outcome, by presenting a number of justifications and viable approaches. This paper suggests that ER presents a number of opportunities for facilitating learner-centred, experiential, and collaborative pedagogical approaches to address different learning needs and knowledge levels. Based on a critical analysis of current literature with examples of ER in different fields, ER could be conceptualized as a tool to be integrated into a holistic pedagogical strategy to equip management students with management knowledge and skills, technical competences, and transferable skills for their benefits of learning facilitation.

By providing students with a highly interactive and hands-on learning experience, robotics promises to inspire a new generation of mathematical learning. This paper aims to review the empirical evidence on the application of robotics in mathematics education and to define future research perspectives of robot-assisted mathematics education. After a systematic search in online database via keyword search and snowballing approach, we analyzed 20 empirical studies on how to teach and learn mathematical knowledge through robotics. The results indicate that (1) most studies were conducted with a small sample size, the largest research groups were elementary school students and secondary school students, most studies used LEGO robots, robots were primarily applied to teach and/or learn graphics, geometry, and algebra, and almost half of the studies taught mathematics by engaging students in game-like interactions with robots; (2) half of the studies adopted a non-experimental research design, and most studies evaluated student performance through observation, test/examination, questionnaires, or verbal interviews; and (3) instructional implications proposed in the 20 papers can be clustered into four themes: human-robot interaction, connections between mathematics and real life, pedagogical suggestions, and facility conditions. The 20 papers suggest that robotics generally plays an active role in mathematics education; however, there are indeed situations in which no significant improvement was found in students' mathematical learning. In view of this, we prospect the future research perspectives of robot-assisted mathematics education and propose that more rigorous intervention studies could be conducted to further explore the integration of robotics and mathematics education.

An integral part of a public affairs education is our ability as educators to adapt and respond to the skills needed for a diverse and changing workforce. Historically, public administration programs have been responsive to an ever-changing workforce by the way we deliver curriculum (e.g., face to face, online, hybrid). This paper invites us to consider a shift in our thinking about course delivery and questions how we can provide an immersive learning experience for our fully online students. In this paper, I suggest Master of Public Administration programs (MPA) should consider the use of telepresence robots so fully online students can also experience a more immersive learning environment. Documenting 20 student experiences in a rural, Western state, this research offers the rich potential for us to rethink the future of public administration course delivery and offer an additional access point for education.

Contribution: This paper presents a model for educational robotics tools and a corresponding set of heuristics for their development and evaluation specifically adapted to the needs and expectations in formal education settings. Background: The increased use of educational robots in classrooms, and the steadily growing number of alternatives from which to choose, bring the requirement for appropriate methods to develop and evaluate these tools. Yet the current body of literature does not provide comprehensive frameworks that allow this question to be adequately addressed. Although previous research has studied the use of educational robotics in classrooms, there is still a lack of methods to support their development and evaluation. Intended Outcomes: An evaluation framework to support researchers, engineers, educators, and decision makers in taking informed decisions about educational robotics systems. Application Design: This paper proposes to consider activities involving educational robotics tools as a kind of "educational augmented tabletop game." Within this framework, a set of fourteen heuristics was devised, based on literature on games and learning tools. The validity of these heuristics was examined with a heterogenous group of twelve school teachers, who tested five different educational robotics systems. Findings: The participating teachers had a high level of approval for the heuristics devised. A heuristic evaluation based on the framework proposed here appeared to more appropriately reflecting the teachers' needs than did conventional methods, namely the isolated comparison of system characteristics.

Productive collaborative learning and the utilization of educational robots as a tool for developing conceptual understanding and promoting student engagement and interest levels are considered crucial components of our teaching and learning environments. This is becoming more prevalent with the rise of making spaces where collaboration is a key principle and expectation for learning from one another. In this paper, we utilized Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) to illustrate how norms and expectations around the educator's role and student's ways of acting and behaving in a hybrid making space disrupted the collaborative experience for a group of fifth-grade students engaged with an educational robotics task. In particular, the collaborative experience became fractured through three contradictions: through the introduction of time, an unclear relationship between students and teacher, and competition for a technological device or tool. Through the examples provided, we demonstrate ways that inattention to expectations and norms in making space design can create obstacles for teachers to foster collaboration and for students to leverage one another's knowledge and skills. We conclude with implications for the design of a collaborative activity within a space that accounts for formal and informal norms and expectations, and recommendations for tools intended for use in a collaborative environment.

This paper presents a new method for accurately measuring the vocabulary size of second language (L2) learners. Traditional vocabulary size tests (VSTs) are limited in capturing a tester's vocabulary and are often population-specific. To overcome these issues, we propose an intelligent vocabulary size measurement method that utilizes massive robot testers. They are equipped with randomized and word-frequency-based vocabularies to simulate L2 learners' variant vocabularies. An intelligent vocabulary size test (IVST) is developed to precisely measure vocabulary size for any population. The robot testers "take" the IVST, which dynamically generates quizzes with varying levels of difficulty adapted to the estimated tester's vocabulary size in real-time using an artificial neural network (ANN) through iterative learning. The effectiveness of the IVST is factually verified by their visible vocabularies. Additionally, we apply a long short-term memory (LSTM) model to further enhance the method's performance. The proposed method has demonstrated high reliability and effectiveness, achieving accuracies of 98.47% for the IVST and 99.87% for the IVST with LSTM. This novel approach provides a more precise and reliable method for measuring vocabulary size in L2 learners compared to traditional VSTs, offering potential benefits to language learners and educators.

There is a growth in the use of robotic telepresence technology, allowing users to remotely access an environment, to support the inclusion/attendance of school pupils experiencing physical/emotional difficulties in the UK. Educational psychologists (EPs) are likely to encounter robotic telepresence technology due to their role in supporting pupil inclusion. Despite the Department for Education exploring this technology as a form of alternative provision, there is a lack of research exploring perceptions around robotic telepresence technology. The current review explores perspectives of users. Database searches were conducted between July 2021 and September 2021, identifying studies published within the last ten years. Eleven papers met the inclusion criteria. The review identified four inductive themes: potential for robotic telepresence technology to promote inclusion; potential for robotic telepresence technology to facilitate engagement; technical design factors influencing utility; and acceptability of robotic telepresence technology to users. Findings are discussed alongside implications for educational psychologists/future research.

In this paper, we investigated whether Canadian preschoolers prefer to learn from a competent robot over an incompetent human using the classic trust paradigm. An adapted Naive Biology task was also administered to assess children's perception of robots. In Study 1, 3-year-olds and 5-year-olds were presented with two informants; A social, humanoid robot (Nao) who labeled familiar objects correctly, while a human informant labeled them incorrectly. Both informants then labeled unfamiliar objects with novel labels. It was found that 3-year-old children equally endorsed the labels provided by the robot and the human, but 5-year-old children learned significantly more from the competent robot. Interestingly, 5-year-olds endorsed Nao's labels even though they accurately categorized the robot as having mechanical insides. In contrast, 3-year-old children associated Nao with biological or mechanical insides equally. In Study 2, new samples of 3-year-olds and 5-year-olds were tested to determine whether the human-like appearance of the robot informant impacted children's trust judgments. The procedure was identical to that of Study 1, except that a non-humanoid robot, Cozmo, replaced Nao. It was found that 3-year-old children still trusted the robot and the human equally and that 5-year-olds preferred to learn new labels from the robot, suggesting that the robot's morphology does not play a key role in their selective trust strategies. It is concluded that by 5 years of age, preschoolers show a robust sensitivity to epistemic characteristics (e.g., competency), but that younger children's decisions are equally driven by the animacy of the informant.

Preschool children (aged 5-6 years) in Singapore learn science by discovering, inquiring, and investigating things that interest them in their daily lives. One approach involves learning science through building and exploring robots based on the Artec robotics curriculum, developed by an established Japanese education provider, Artec Co., Ltd. This paper presents the findings from a research project that aimed to observe and identify the learning of a group of six preschool children (5 years) in science through an hour-long Artec robotics lesson, The Catch of the Day; this involved building a robotic fishing rod that mimics a real fishing rod. In terms of learning outcomes, the preschool children built, explored, and examined the science concepts and principles behind a real fishing rod by exploring the robotic version. This qualitative and quantitative research incorporates the research methods of documentary analysis and classroom observation. The results indicate that through the inquiry and investigation of the robotic fishing rod, the preschool children discovered the science concepts and principles of the spool, reel, and handle. The children learned that each fishing rod has a reel-to-reel fishing line to catch a fish. The preschool children observed that the reel's handle and spool were connected by the spool's gears, and upon turning the handle, the spool would spin to reel in the fishing line. The study demonstrates that it is productive for preschool children to learn science concepts and principles by building, exploring, and examining robots. The Artec robotic curriculum comprises various robotic themes for children to learn science and is a useful learning platform for preschool children in Singapore.

There is increasing interest in the potential use of educational robotics (ER) in higher education. Few studies have considered teachers' perceptions of using ER outside science and engineering. This qualitative research aims to investigate university teachers' perceived opportunities and challenges of using ER in management education from three interconnected dimensions, curriculum, pedagogy, and technological domain, by means of narrative analysis. The findings suggest the potential of using ER to develop discipline-specific knowledge and technological and transferable skills for management students. This research contributes by enriching the current conceptual discussions predicated upon teachers' perceptions as determinants of technology adoption, and ER's role in engaging students in the learning process premised on Vygotskian social constructivism. Practically, this paper provides insights into exploring the possibilities and obstacles of adopting ER in management education.

This paper reports findings from a study where regional, rural, and remote (RRR) educators were involved in a Queensland Government-funded 3-year Central Queensland (CQ) STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) Cluster Project designed to enhance student learning opportunities. This project provided STEM professional development, with a focus on robotics, helping teachers prepare students for a new regional robotics competition via informal school clubs. It was designed to empower RRR teachers to implement engaging, real-world STEM practices in their schools and focused on how aspects of the Australian Digital Technologies Curriculum (DTC) learning area connected with student robotics learning. Data were collected using survey responses from teachers participating in the professional development (PD). Attending PD significantly improved teacher confidence in supporting student robotics clubs. The project provides some evidence that access to physical resources (robotics kits), effective PD design (hands-on and differentiated learning), and partnerships (industry involvement) are all important for creating sustainable STEM education ecosystems within regional areas.

The purpose of this study was to explore how kindergarten students (aged 5-6 years) engaged with mathematics as they learned programming with robot coding toys. We video-recorded 16 teaching sessions of kindergarten students' (N = 36) mathematical and programming activities. Students worked in small groups (4-5 students) with robot coding toys on the floor in their classrooms, solving tasks that involved programming these toys to move to various locations on a grid. Drawing on a semiotic mediation perspective, we analyzed video data to identify the mathematics concepts and skills students demonstrated and the overlapping mathematics-programming knowledge exhibited by the students during these programming tasks. We found that kindergarten children used spatial, measurement, and number knowledge, and the design of the tasks, affordances of the robots, and types of programming knowledge influenced how the students engaged with mathematics. The paper concludes with a discussion about the intersections of mathematics and programming knowledge in early childhood, and how programming robot toys elicited opportunities for students to engage with mathematics in dynamic and interconnected ways, thus creating an entry point to reassert mathematics beyond the traditional school content and curriculum.

To broaden participation in robotics education, a free, after-school robotics program has been designed and developed at a public university. As part of a longitudinal study, this paper reports the first iteration of the program, offered to 12 students from Grades 3 through 7 in spring 2022. Three preservice teachers were trained as co-facilitators. Applying the design-based research methodology, we conducted a literature review to identify preliminary design principles for the robotics program, applied these principles to design specifications, and implemented the program with its first cohort of students. Quantitative and qualitative data were collected from multiple sources. Findings reveal that students had positive program experience and demonstrated improved computational thinking (CT), but more scaffolds were needed to support the development of more advanced CT skills. Implications for future program design and research are discussed.

This paper presents the results of a confirmatory factor analysis on two self-efficacy scales designed to probe the self-efficacy of college-level introductory astronomy (Astro-101) students (n ¼ 15181) from 22 institutions across the United States of America and Canada. The students undertook a course based on similar curriculum materials, which involved students using robotic telescopes to support their learning of astronomical concepts covered in the "traditional" Astro-101 courses. Previous research by the authors using these self-efficacy scales within a pre-/post-test approach showed both high reliabilities and very high construct validities. However, the scale purporting to measure students' self-efficacy in relation to their use of the astronomical instrumentation associated with online robotic telescopes was particularly skewed and required further investigation. This current study builds on the previous work and shows how a slight adjustment of the survey items presents an improved and robust scale for measuring self-efficacy.

Technology integration has become increasingly prevalent in language education and technology teaching tools are currently used for English instruction. In line with this trend, it is also believed to be influential in teaching and learning pronunciation. To cast an empirical light on this issue, this study aimed to analyse the influence of Virtual Reality Assisted Pronunciation Training (VRAPT) on pronunciation of young Iranian EFL learners. With respect to this, 18 low-intermediate English language learners (6-12 years old) were invited to take part in the study held in the lab at Sharif University of Technology in Iran. First, their English language pronunciation was measured by a pronunciation pre-test through "Speech ace Browser." Next, in a virtual environment, during 10 sessions (each session 90 minutes), the participants received instructions on all of the pronunciation items measured in the test (consists of English vowels like /[near-close near-front unrounded vowel]/ and /i/ and also vowels of /[near-close back rounded vowel]/ and /u/) through the Virtual Reality (VR) game administered by a humanoid robot. The results of a paired samples t-test revealed that there was a significant difference between learners' performance before and after the training sessions. This paper recommends that simulated games within virtual reality could be applied in enhancing pronunciation skills of EFL learners and utilized in helping them to develop native-like pronunciation. It also generates new ways of thinking about VRAPT as an innovative teaching approach and creating an efficient and pleasurable English learning environment.

Despite the fact that the sophisticated technologies are a substantial component of children's everyday environment, of the space within which they act, play and learn--the world of complex technological systems (their characteristics, and the knowledge and skills involved in operating, designing and programming them) is almost ignored in the preschool and elementary school curriculum. The study reported in this paper is part of a research plan embedded in the implementation of a comprehensive curriculum aiming to support the development of technological thinking in kindergartens, including knowledge and skills in areas such as design, the artifacts in our material culture, smart artifacts and robotic systems, or programming. This particular study aimed to address young children's (aged 5-8) perception of the adaptive behavior of a robot and the representational structures (or functioning schemes) they adopt to think about how its behaviors are generated and controlled. When children think about the robot's behavior, they may adopt different perspectives that translate into different representational structures, (e.g., one-time episodic representation; a script that can became a reusable routine; a universal representation such as a rule of behavior). The findings evidence the ability of young children engaged in programming to think in terms of abstract rules and to use these for programming and designing a robot's behavior.

Educational robotics has become one of the most effective methods to teach STEM concepts in a practical and didactic way at all educational level. In this context, the LEGO Mindstorms robotic platforms have been widely used due to their versatility ease of use and modularity. Despite this, most of the papers focus on K-12 and undergraduate levels, with little information reported in the literature about educational experiences at the graduate level. This article deals with the use of educational robotics for the teaching of mathematical concepts at the graduate level, and more specifically on the physical visualization of metrics (Euclidean, Taxicab, and Infinity), and the convergence of Cauchy sequence using a mobile robots LEGO Mindstorms NXT. The educational experience was applied to a group of graduate students who offered good comments on this type of educational activity and its usefulness to understand the mathematical concepts addressed. It was observed that this type of educational experiences motivates students to use mathematical concepts in interdisciplinary problems and encourages them to understand their functionality and application in the real world.

This paper presents findings from an on-going international study of Early Childhood (EC) teachers' and children's use of Internet of Toys (IoToys) to understand possibilities for developing children's cognitive capacities (e.g., creativity, inquiry, engineering design thinking). The study employed a Design Based Research (DBR) method, where teachers intentionally plan and deliver technologically constructed Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) experiences for preschoolers. Using Australia as a case study, data collection involved participant observation of three teachers' and 17 children's technology constructed play experiences with robotic toys, littleBits electronic magnetic blocks, alongside pre and post semi-structured interviews with teachers and children's photo voice sessions were video recorded. Analysing the findings using embodied cognition theory showed that the teachers, although novice in their own technological pedagogical knowledge engaged children's play with the robotic toys, and co-learn with the children. Integration of STEM-focused playful experiences supported children's scientific inquiry, design thinking and creativity as well as vocabulary targeted at interdisciplinary STEM concepts. With the ever increasing focus on developing children's 21st century skills, this study recommends engineering habits of mind, creativity and inquiry dispositions should now be taken into account in teaching and learning situations with young children and to develop STEM engagement.

Within the process of progressive digitization of materials and tools for teaching and distance learning of a subject of introduction to Microeconomics (quarterly, in year three of the Degree in Social Work), taught by the authors at the National University of Distance Education (UNED), a virtual assistant in the form of "chatbot," or conversational robot, called EconBot, has been designed and made available to students from 2017. This paper presents the reasons that led to its adoption, the process of its development, differentiating two phases, its characteristics and functions, the assessment of its usefulness and the role of teachers in the implementation of this type of technological innovation.

The international "FIRST® LEGO® League (FLL): Challenge" is a popular educational robotics and STEM competition designed to promote primary and early high school students' STEM interests and careers, and twenty-first century skill development. The "FLL Challenge" currently involves over 318,000 students (aged 9-16 years) in approximately 110 countries. In this paper, we present a semi-systematic historical review of the research literature focussed on the competition's impact on school students' STEM attitudes, learning, and twenty-first century skill development. Through our review process, we found a total of 26 publications between 2004 and 2022 which met our inclusion criteria, and identified the emergence and development of three significant historical research themes: (1) impacts on students' motivation, STEM learning, and attitudes, (2) development of twenty-first century skills, and (3) coaching/pedagogical strategies to support student learning and skill development. The first theme was further refined through three subcategories focussed on impacts on female participants, ethnic minority groups, and students with special needs. International research findings regarding the impacts of "FLL Challenge" participation on students' motivation, STEM attitudes, and learning were positive for all student groups, especially female participants, but not always statistically significant. Findings regarding positive short-term impacts on twenty-first century skill development were broadly consistent, but long-term impact findings were inconclusive. The influence of coaches' skills and pedagogical expertise upon students' learning and skill development in the "FLL Challenge" is a potentially underrepresented area of research.

In 2010 1.1 million pupils took private lessons in Germany, with 25% of all German children by the age of 17 having attended paid private lessons at some point in their school career (Klemm & Klemm, 2010). The high demand for support for learning curricular content led us to consider an integrated solution that speeds up both the design of mobile learning games as well as their implementation and adaption. This paper describes the iterative development of a game development framework for touch-based mobile learning games. The framework focuses on touch-controlled interaction due to the fact that in 2014 more than 87% of German teenagers possess a smart phone with touch input (Feierabend, Plankenhorn, Rathgeb, 2014) as well as the possibility to engage in short bursts of learning experiences during their idle time, e.g. when commuting. The framework consists of a conceptual component that specifies five different game modes for casual mobile learning games. The technical part of the framework builds on the Unity game engine and offers an architecture that mirrors the game modes and objects from the conceptual part as well as a layer of service building blocks that cover generic functionality like logging, high score management or social media integration. The development of the framework is iterative and cyclic in that each produced game enriches the framework, which in turn accelerates the prototyping and development of further games. Additionally the games themselves are developed and tested iteratively, both concerning usability/user-experience and transfer, which is described in this paper.