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Students' Attitudes and Motivation During Robotics Activities

Published: 09 November 2015 Publication History

Abstract

This work investigates students' attitudes towards and motivation for learning robotics and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics). The population consisted of middle-school students (ages 13-15 years) who participated in the FIRST® LEGO® League competition. The methodology used both qualitative and quantitative instruments: questionnaires, observations and interviews during the school year 2012--2013. Research continued with one group during 2013--2014. Four categories were investigated: intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, self-determination and self-efficacy, as well as other environmental factors (gender, peers, parents and teachers). The results showed no significant difference between the beginning and end of the activities on all the categories. We consider this as a positive indicator, since most of the students demonstrated high and positive attitudes toward and motivation for learning robotics at the beginning of the activities and maintained the results after the activities. The environmental factors played an important role in positively influencing students' attitudes and motivation. In particular, females showed more positive attitudes and motivation at the end of the activities.

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  • (2024)Does really educational robotics improve secondary school students’ course motivation, achievement and attitude?Education and Information Technologies10.1007/s10639-024-12773-129:17(23753-23780)Online publication date: 31-May-2024
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cover image ACM Other conferences
WiPSCE '15: Proceedings of the Workshop in Primary and Secondary Computing Education
November 2015
149 pages
ISBN:9781450337533
DOI:10.1145/2818314
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 09 November 2015

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Author Tags

  1. Attitudes
  2. middle-school
  3. motivation
  4. robotics

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WiPSCE '15

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Overall Acceptance Rate 104 of 279 submissions, 37%

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Cited By

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  • (2025)robótica en la formación docente universitariaIJERI: International Journal of Educational Research and Innovation10.46661/ijeri.11021Online publication date: 26-Feb-2025
  • (2024)Affordances of Technology for Sustainability-Oriented K–12 Informal Engineering EducationSustainability10.3390/su1616671916:16(6719)Online publication date: 6-Aug-2024
  • (2024)Does really educational robotics improve secondary school students’ course motivation, achievement and attitude?Education and Information Technologies10.1007/s10639-024-12773-129:17(23753-23780)Online publication date: 31-May-2024
  • (2024)Systematic review: Potential effectiveness of educational robotics for 21st century skills development in young learnersEducation and Information Technologies10.1007/s10639-023-12233-229:9(11135-11153)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2024
  • (2023)Usability Evaluation of Educational RoboticsProceedings of the 7th International Conference on Education and Multimedia Technology10.1145/3625704.3625719(62-68)Online publication date: 29-Aug-2023
  • (2023)Elaborating Student Engagement in Compulsory K-12 Computer Science ClassProceedings of the 18th WiPSCE Conference on Primary and Secondary Computing Education Research10.1145/3605468.3609762(1-4)Online publication date: 27-Sep-2023
  • (2023)Gender disparity in STEM education: a survey research on girl participants in World Robot OlympiadInternational Journal of Technology and Design Education10.1007/s10798-023-09830-034:2(629-646)Online publication date: 6-May-2023
  • (2023)A Literature Review of Educational Robotics and Early Childhood EducationTechnological Innovations in Education10.1007/978-981-99-2785-2_6(71-83)Online publication date: 22-Jun-2023
  • (2023)Metacognitive Processes Involved in Human Robot Interaction in the School Learning EnvironmentHuman-Computer Interaction10.1007/978-3-031-35599-8_6(85-100)Online publication date: 9-Jul-2023
  • (2023)Game Making and Coding Fluency in a Primary Computing ContextTeaching Coding in K-12 Schools10.1007/978-3-031-21970-2_12(171-187)Online publication date: 28-Feb-2023
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