The Effects of Educational Robotics on STEM Students' Engagement and Reflective Thinking

This Full-Length Research Paper deals with the effectiveness of training using educational robots on developing various skills for metacognitive thinking and engagement. Educational Robotics (ER) is a subject that aims to introduce children to robotics and programming through hands-on activities starting at a young age. There is evidence that ER plays a crucial role in enhancing students' academic achievement, cognitive abilities, and programming skills. Despite the growing interest in implementing ER to promote learning outcomes, there has been far too little focus on demonstrating ER effects on the development of certain types of thinking abilities (e.g. reflective thinking), and social skills that include engagement and its pedagogical implications. This study aims to evaluate the effects of ER on STEM students' engagement and reflective thinking. A sample of 24 middle school students (age range: 11-13 years) took part in an intensive ER-Lab for 6 sessions (3 weeks) by using open-source hardware and software kits through articulated robots and mobile robots. The research data in this study are drawn from two main sources on a five-point Likert scale: engagement questionnaire, and reflective thinking scale. The results of this investigation showed that students keep pleasure experience interacting and performing robotics activities. The results also showed a remarkable superiority of the students' reflective thinking skills on the dimensions (habitual action, understanding, reflection, and critical reflection). Students reflected their expectations and challenges after ER training with sets of recommendations accordingly. This study contributes to robotics' STEM education by expanding the scope of prior research to provide evidence of ER impact on 21st-century skills, particularly, reflective thinking skills. Based on the study's findings, we suggest developing robotic activities in different ER learning scenarios for a better understanding of the engagement processes. We recommend expanding the pedagogical possibilities of ER in improving extensive thinking skills, adaptation, and encouraging socialization and collaboration. This encourages exploring the feedback, reflection, and needs of the teachers and parents in terms of the impact of ER training on students thinking skills.