Robot Programming Integrated in a Secondary Junior School Curriculum

When teachers supervise pupils in designing, writing and verifying programs for moving small robots, they have many opportunities of addressing the students toward manipulating concepts from standard education curricula. For this reason we affirm that educational robotics makes possible to integrate programming activities in current schools curricula rather than adding some form of ICT as one more subject side of traditional subjects. Such integration is important because rarely addressed in other approaches for introducing technology in education though considered as the best use of computing in schools already in Papert’s researches of the 1970ies. Here we describe in progress activities with 12 to 14 years old pupils using the RCX and NXT Lego bricks and writing programs in a Logo-like programming language with a development environment specifically implemented for young students. A promising direction of work is exploiting how robot programming can support teachers in motivating elementary algebra, typically addressed in secondary junior schools, with opportunities of relating particular solutions to more general ones.