Studying real-world societal problems in a STEM context through robotics
This work addresses the challenge of enhancing STEM education for students through robotics, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing educational frameworks without introducing major innovations.
The paper tackled the problem of engaging students with STEM concepts by designing three educational robotics workshops that integrate real-world societal problems, finding that this approach provided a multidisciplinary context for child-robot interaction and aimed to increase student interest in STEM education and careers.
In this paper, we will discuss the design and implementation of three educational robotics workshops that focus on the use of robotics for addressing real-world societal problems. Through the workshops, we aimed to investigate how the integration of real-world problems to robotics can provide a multidisciplinary approach for child-robot interaction that allows students to engage with different STE(A)M concepts. In addition, we examined if this integration increased or strengthened students' interest in STEM/robotics education and careers. The workshops were designed and implemented in the context of the European project Educational Robotics for STEM (ER4STEM) with students from different age groups using Lego Mindstorms and Arduino kits.