Educational Robotics Applications as Tools to Support the Social Interactions and Integration of Refugee Children in the Community of Schools of Primary Education

The paper presents an attempt made to use the Arduino platform and the Scratch for Arduino (S4A) environment for the implementation of an educational project for 6th grade primary school students in a classroom attended by refugee, immigrants, and indigenous students. The aim was to investigate the opportunity to use educational robotics as tools to support the social interactions and social inclusion of refugee children in the classroom community. The research was a case study implemented in a primary school in rural Greece. Students had to work in groups to design, build, and program a construction that simulates an "escape room." Students of each group solving a riddle of the other groups must discover a code to unlock the door of the "escape room," based on a series of six worksheets of increasing difficulty to create their final construction. The research tools were a diagnostic questionnaire, an evaluation questionnaire, specially designed worksheets, an observation sheet for participatory observation, and sociometric test tools. Based on the findings it could be supported that educational robotics are able to support social interactions of refugee children to a certain extent. The intervention supported social interactions and collaboration among students but without solving the problem of difficulties in the social integration of refugee students in the classroom community. Verbally all students stated that they had not any problem cooperating with refugee students, but this was not strongly reflected in practice. Greek students interacted strongly with immigrant students and refugee students seemed to prefer interacting with immigrant students too. [For the full proceedings, see ED656038.]