Fostering Students’ Problem-Solving Skills Through Educational Robotics in Primary School

Problem-solving is considered as one of the key competencies for the 21st century learners. In recent years, Educational Robotics (ER) proved to be a powerful tool to promote both computational thinking and problem-solving ability. However, research is still lacking in pathways to integrate ER into lower education curricula in order to use it as a real ‘cognitive artifact’. Furthermore, ER and coding are often introduced at school through short-term extra-curricular activities. This research paper reports on an extended path on both coding and ER, involving an Italian fourth-grade class which was fully integrated into the class curriculum. The contribution is thus aimed at analyzing the effects of ER integration on problem-solving skills development, focusing on three main components of this ability (reported on Lucangeli’s SPM test): comprehension, representation, and categorization. Multiple comparisons analysis was carried out using Friedman and Nemenyi post-hoc tests. The results show an improvement in students’ problem-solving skills. The strong points outlined in this path are its interdisciplinary and multimodal approach. The various activities proposed led students to regularly argue, negotiate, and collaborate, working on multiple domains of knowledge and with different kinds of tools. Moreover, the design of the path enhances the alternation of some binomials: theory-practice, frontal lesson-cooperative learning, and analog-digital dimension.