The use of Educational Robotics for the teaching of Physics and its relation to self-esteem

Abstract

The aim of this article is to use Educational Robotics(ER) in the discipline of Physics in order to investigate certain attitudes of Grade 10 students about Physics and to correlate these with certain cognitive structures and the learning performance. It is well known that the Computational experiment includes three phases, namely the modeling phase, the simulation phase and the computational phase. In this framework ER is a good candidate to implement the computational experiment since it uses the simulation phase not as a screen simulation but using a real device control. In our work ER was also used as an active learning theory tool in order to investigate the development of the algorithmic approach, a fundamental ingredient of the computational science. In our research we used the programming language Basic-Stamp and during the project students had the chance to explore-change the pseudo as well as the real code in order to make different measurements of various physical quantities and to deal with the algorithm of the application.