Attractive Educational Robotics Motivates Younger Students to Learn Programming and Computational Thinking

Educational robotics and physical computing have proved to be good sources of motivation for students of all ages and school levels. We conducted a series of workshops in the primary schools of city of Joensuu in eastern Finland, focusing on training the fundamental computational thinking (CT) skills by using a programmable and interactive Teddy Bear toy. Educational robotics and physical computing devices have proved to be an efficient way to teach these skills regardless the students’ age group or previous background. To assess the students’ intrinsic motivation towards Teddy Bear programming, we devised a survey for workshop participants and conducted a statistical analysis to compare differences between the genders and age groups. The results of the large-scale empirical study (n=1440) show that the students at the age of 9-10 years (Grades 3-4) are significantly more motivated towards such a learning tool than the students of age 11-12 years (Grades 5-6). Furthermore, we show that especially young girls find the Teddy Bear programming motivating and they are eager to learn more. This indicates that appealing tools play a key role when teaching programming and CT concepts to young school children.