Abstract
Educational robotics competitions such as the World Robot Olympiad (WRO) are popular out-of-school learning settings for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education, especially Computer Science (CS) education. The aim of this competition (alike many other initiatives) is to prepare students for a life in the digital age by fostering their 21st century skills and motivate them to choose a profession the field of STEM. Regardless, many initiatives fail to monitor their impact. In 2019, the organizers of the WRO conducted an impact evaluation study in collaboration with the CS education group of the University of Würzburg to address this issue. In this article we present the results of this evaluation study regarding the students’ learning of 21st century skills.
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Notes
- 1.
Online here: https://www.worldrobotolympiad.de/ or https://wro-association.org/home/ (last accessed 10th March 2020)
- 2.
Selected results of the study on the influence of the WRO on their career choices can be found in [6].
- 3.
As this is just a short excerpt from the results of this evaluation study, interested readers can continue reading about the results in the corresponding technical report and on the website here: http://tb-ev.de/wirkung (in German) and in the executive summary (in English) here: https://www.worldrobotolympiad.de/website/docs/tb/Evaluation-Study-WRO-Germany.pdf (last accessed 3rd August 2020).
- 4.
The skill development (in %) was calculated as normalized gain (Hake’s g):
$$ Hake^{\prime}s g = \frac{post score\,- \,pre score}{\hbox{max} score \,-\, pre score} $$This formula views the achieved gain in relation to the highest possible gain (relative gain).
The comparison of subgroups was conducted using this relative gain.
- 5.
Online here: https://www.first-lego-league.org/de/ or http://www.firstlegoleague.org/ (last accessed 10th March 2020).
- 6.
- 7.
The evaluation results of the FLL and RoboCup Junior in Germany can be found here: https://www.hands-on-technology.org/de/vision/wirkung.html (last accessed 10th March 2020)
- 8.
The results of multiple evaluation studies on the programs can be found in FIRST’s resource library here: https://www.firstinspires.org/resource-library/first-impact (last accessed 10th March 2020).
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Pöhner, N., Hennecke, M., Fleige, M. (2021). Learning 21st Century Skills Through Educational Robotics Competitions. In: Lepuschitz, W., Merdan, M., Koppensteiner, G., Balogh, R., Obdržálek, D. (eds) Robotics in Education. RiE 2020. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 1316. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67411-3_15
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