Robot Programming Integrated in a Junior High School Curriculum

Schoolchildren and students have opportunities of actively and concretely manipulate concepts from traditional disciplines when designing, writing and verifying programs for controlling the motion of mini-robots. Thus, educational robotics may naturally allow integrating robot programming activities into traditional subjects of standard curricula instead of adding some form of ICT as a (software) tool for practicing topics from one subject or as one more separate subject. Such an integration, though considered a most fruitful educational usage of computers already in Papert’s researches of the 70’s, is nowadays rarely present in the proposals for introducing computing technologies in schools. Here we present in-progress activities with pupils in the age range 11-14 using RCX and NXT Lego bricks, with a Logo-like programming language supplemented by a development environment specifically implemented for young students. We describe how robot programming has given pupils the chance of manipulating direct and inverse proportions and the concepts of speed and friction in activities coordinated with presentations of these topics in pupils school curriculum. We also comment on the opportunities, while programming mini-robots, of discussing with pupils for comparing solutions to given problems and identifying specific and more general ones. A future direction of our work, toward motivating elementary algebra, arises from these discussions.