Workshop on Educational Robotics

RoboCupJunior Workshop on Educational Robotics

(an event co-located with the RoboCup Symposium)

The use of robotics for educational purposes has been pursued for a long time and has become a trend that continues to gain popularity each year. Several factors have contributed to such a situation, including the availability of developmentally appropriate and less expensive robotics kits and individual components as well as the proliferation of robotics competitions for the pre-university levels. As a consequence, robotics started to be incorporated into classrooms and lessons and has become an educational tool for teaching concepts in a broad range of areas, from electricity and mechanics to programming, mathematics, physics, etc.

In this workshop, we aim at bringing together teachers, mentors, and students from schools, clubs, community centers, and educational institutions offering formal and informal educational robotics learning opportunities, to discuss their experiences and current practices using robotics. This workshop hopes to also provide a place to share relevant projects and discuss specific technical issues that may arise in different learning settings as well as the impact of robotics in education.

Some examples of topics of particular interest to this workshop are:

  • Impact of educational robotics on student learning
  • Impact of educational robotics in the community
  • School projects involving robotics
  • Specific use of robots to promote the understanding of STEM concepts
  • Techniques to build robots
  • Innovative use of sensors or new technology
  • Science of mentoring/facilitating robotic teams/learning
  • Integration of AI including machine learning into educational robotics
  • Showcase of students (teams) accomplishment with robotics, especially in RoboCupJunior leagues (selected by the League Committees)

Types of presentations are:

  • Mentor/teacher presentation of their research and/or practice (20 min)
  • Students/team presentation of their accomplishment (showcase, 15 min)
  • Hands-on workshop to introduce or teach new robotics ideas/tools (1 hr)