The Educational Robotics Landscape Exploring Common Ground and Contact Points.

In the last decades, educational robotics has gained increased attention evoking a need to discuss and document different approaches and lessons learned. In this article, we report our findings made during the “Educational Robotics Cafe”, a workshop format where experts engage in an open discussion about opportunities and challenges of the educational robotics landscape as well as advantages and shortcomings of various approaches. Interestingly, participants working on different educational robotics topics with different methods realized that all seemed to have similar problems and experiences. They could define areas of common ground, yet had difficulties in finding contact points between their educational robotics approaches to compare them. Known categorizations seemed not to fit or to be too high level. Based on these findings, we finish our article by suggesting a “tagging” approach to enable better communication between experts from different domains like education or robotics.