Recently, the University of Malta represented by Dr Patrick Camilleri and Professor Suzanne Gatt, both from the Faculty of Education, hosted an Erasmus+ multiplier event designated as Robotics for Primary Schools in the 21st century, in short Robo21C.
Notwithstanding the stormy weather, the strong turnout of participating teachers was a clear indication of the keen interest that teachers demonstrate to learn about the employment of Robotics and computational thinking in the discipline of Technology Enhanced Learning and Teaching.
During the event the 100+ primary school teachers who attended were enriched with insightful talks by Emmanuel Zammit, director from the Directorate of Digital Literacy and Transversal Skills, Dr Leonie Baldacchino, director of the Edward de Bono Institute for the Design and Development of Thinking and Dr Janet Georgeson from the University of Plymouth. These were then followed by parallel workshops whereas participants were actively involved in hands-on activities that allowed them to experience the use of Tablet PCs, Lego WeDo and programming in formal educational contexts.
Robo21C is a multinational consortium of 11 European schools and higher education institutes. The initiative is directed towards creating the right 21st century prerequisites in primary school children, incentivising and therefore enabling them to become responsible, confident and creative users of ICT.
The project will soon come to an end, but its objectives to introduce and work with digital technologies such as Blue-bots, Pro-bots, Lego WeDo and Lego Mindstorms with primary school children and respective teachers alike has had very positive outcomes.
Subsequently, as students and teachers alike were introduced and learned computational skills, elements directed towards exploring ways of introducing young people to decision-making situations, entrepreneurship and ways of incorporating lessons learnt into ongoing and future education research were nurtured.
More info about the project may be found at: http://robo21c.com/about-the-project/