One of the main difficulties that students face in physic courses in secondary school is the lack of interest about theoretical problems. Educational robotics have the potential to be used as powerful educational tools to motivate students. Nevertheless, learning activities with robotics kits are usually isolated from official curriculum. In fact, there is usually no evaluation about student learning outcomes in these activities. In this paper, we present IDEE, a learning environment that, through a visual programming environment and a robotic kit, proposes to the students a set of learning activities following a scientific procedure approach. All the interaction data about the performance of students is stored in a database. This information makes it possible to adapt the statements of the problems to the profiles of the students, while allowing support to teachers in the assessment of the learning process.
This Innovative Practice Category Full Paper presents the proposal of a model to develop adaptive educational resources, with the aim to promote robotic teaching in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) courses. This model was designed to be integrated with a Learning Management System, to suggest customized activities and teaching materials according to students’ learning cognitive styles, and it is extensible, can be applied in others areas, not limited to robotics. This model aims at stimulating the teaching programming with robots, providing an environment that students can remotely program robots through a programming language, monitor their evolution in the environment and evaluate the activities that have been suggested. A feasibility study was realized with 6 professors to validate this proposal, and the UTAUT model was applied with 24 students, to validate the acceptance model study.
Petri net modeling has well-known algorithms, so it is easy to develop computer tools to build, edit, and analyse these networks. These tools are designed to be able to add extensions giving additional functionality, such as an extension for evaluation networks.