How Robotics Education transforms your Students' STEM experiences
- John Hernandez
- May 4, 2021
- 4 min read
Updated: Nov 6, 2022
It is not a secret that many students turn their face in other directions when you mention math, programming, physics, or engineering. The case wasn't different when I first met my G8 students beginning the school year. The plan was to teach them how to start coding using Python as part of the Computer Science (CS) curriculum, and I wanted to create an environment where they find coding fun and valuable, as I believe it is. During the first semester, I taught them the basics of the programming language using games that they can create, guiding them through the experience of thinking logically and sequentially, and helped them to realize bugs in their programs. Also, I used activities such as the hour of code (part of the Computer Science Education Week[1]) to show them how CS can be a tool for social justice (which was this year's topic); in the figure below, we can see the introduction of the activity to session 1. They learned that creating a program or an app isn't constrained to business ideas, and they could use CS to solve community problems.