Educational robotics and STEM in primary education: a review and a meta-analysis

Abstract

Educational Robotics (ER) and Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics (STEM) have entered schools and are parts of formal and informal education. Consequently, a wide range of relevant activities and interventions, from kindergarten to high school, are carried out emphasizing their potential benefits, in relation to traditional curriculum, while skepticism also appears among researchers and specialists. To highlight issues on this matter, this paper presents a lucid and systematic literature review exploring the effects and characteristics of ER research. In this work, 21 empirical articles out of 808 records from 8 databases were employed. The main features of the articles, such as research design, sample size, intervention objectives, equipment type, and activities, were recorded and elaborated to understand the types and the significance of inquiries conducted in the field. In addition, 57 studies involving 10,913 participants, which emerged from the review search, were subjected to a meta-analysis and investigated the effects of ER and STEM use on students’ knowledge, skills, and attitudes. The finding showed that most of the related studies are non-experimental with limited duration, and more effort is needed to apply these technologies in less traditional domains like language learning or history. The meta-analysis showed that ER and STEM have a positive impact on knowledge, skills, and attitudes, while students’ skills proved to have benefited the most from the use of these technologies.

Keywords:

• Primary education
• educational robotics
• systematic literature review
• meta-analysis

Acknowledgements

We thank the anonymous reviewers for their time.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that they have no competing interests

Data availability statement

The datasets are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Theodosios Sapounidis

Prof. Dr. Theodosios Sapounidis is currently an Assistant Professor at the Department of Philosophy and Education at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and teaches lessons related to educational technology. Theodosios was an Assistant Professor at the Department of Information and Electronic Engineering at the International Hellenic University and has worked on multiple research projects in the Schools of Medicine, Informatics, Engineering, Psychology, and Philosophy and Education. He was also awarded 6 times, Internationally and nationally for his works on educational robotics and tangible user interfaces.

Sokratis Tselegkaridis

Sokratis Tselegkaridis, is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Information and Electronic Engineering at the International Hellenic University, with a thesis “Study of interfaces in education for microcontroller electronics circuits”. During his studies, he achieved several distinctions, while his B.Sc. thesis received a Patent Diploma entitled “PCB generation via polarized light” from the Hellenic Industrial Property Organization. Since January 2021 he has been working as a Laboratory Associate, teaching courses such as Embedded Systems and Computer Networks. His research interests revolve around teaching electronic circuits, educational robotics, and STEM education.

Dimitrios Stamovlasis

Prof. Dr. Dimitrios Stamovlasis, is an Associate Professor of Research Methodology and Statistics for Social Sciences, at the Department of Philosophy and Education at the AUTH University of Thessaloniki and teaches related courses at undergraduate and graduate levels focusing on educational research. His research interests are interdisciplinary and they focus: on methodological and epistemological issues of contemporary social sciences that improve theory building; on nonlinear dynamics (complexity, catastrophe theory, entropy, and related fields), and their application to social, behavioral, and life sciences.