Engineers Designing and Implementing Activities for School Students: What Have we Learned?

Abstract

Robotics kits are spreading out in the market, becoming more convenient, but more is required to determine their impact on educational activities, such us participants' perceptions and factors that could affect the activity. This paper presents an educational activity, which was designed with two main goals in mind. i) Determine if there is any impact of the programming language used in the activity and ii) create a baseline to change various factors in upcoming workshops. It was started with a series of six workshops held in the campus of the university and taken by 124 participants. Results indicate that in general working with robots is interesting and fun, there is no difference between males and females besides the question/factor of using technology to learn, and working in teams. Nevertheless, they also suggest that participants' previous experience on programming must align with the difficulty level of the workshop.