Abstract
In schools and universities, there is currently a lack of interest in the STEM subjects (mathematics, informatics, natural sciences and technology) and well-trained teachers for these subjects in Austria and Slovakia. Particularly women are underrepresented in the STEM fields, which further leads to bottlenecks in the job market, although there is an increasing demand for STEM staff in both countries. Educational Robotics has proven to be a valuable tool for practical learning, not only for robotics itself but for STEM topics in general. The project RoboCoop encourages and engages 1800 pupils from secondary schools in Austria and Slovakia to serve as a positive example of more extensive use of educational robotics at the national level in the two countries. The robotic workshops introduce the world of robots and foster creativity and collaboration skills. A comprehensive quantitative and qualitative evaluation of all workshop activities should allow the identification of best practice activities for teachers in order to ensure systematic and long-term implementation of the robotic activities. The corresponding evaluation tool is introduced in this paper and results with 352 secondary school pupils are presented.
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Acknowledgements
The authors acknowledge the financial support from EU Interreg V-A SK-AT project RoboCoop under grant agreement number V212. We would like to thank Hannah Hieber, Christoph Hackenberger, Stefan Polydor and Victoria Zach for their support in carrying out the workshops and collecting the data.
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Jäggle, G., Lepuschitz, W., Tomitsch, T., Wachter, P., Vincze, M. (2021). Towards a Conceptual and Methodological Framework for the Evaluation of Educational Robotics Activities. 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_20
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