Abstract—This paper intends to analyze the implementation
of the Festival de Robótica - AZORESminiBOT, a robotics
festival for the young which purpose was to create learning
experiences that lead to the utilization of robots, promoting
coding skills and computational thinking, as well as cooperative
problem solving and with the mobilization of knowledge from
specific curricular areas. At the same time, we intended to
sensitize teachers to the relevance and comprehensiveness that
robotic and coding activities can have in an educational
environment. The festival took place in a school located at São
Miguel Island, Azores. The proposed activities and the
participation of the children in the four stations available were
evaluated using direct observation and surveys by
questionnaire. From the observations made by the researchers
and the answers to the questionnaires of the 155 children who
participated, 11 teachers, and 22 collaborators who facilitated
the activities, it was concluded that the activities implemented
were of interest to the children and were considered relevant by
the teachers, but some aspects concerning the operation of the
robots and the scenarios created should be taken care of in the
future so that the pedagogical component is effective and of
quality.
Index Terms—Computational thinking, educational robotics,
programming, primary education.
Ana Isabel Santos is with University of the Azores, Faculty of Social
Sciences and Humanities, Interdisciplinary Centre for Childhood and
Adolescence – NICA-UAc, Portugal.
Dora Pereira is with Antero de Quental Secondary School, Azores,
Portugal.
Nanci Botelho is with Colégio do Castanheiro, Azores, Portugal.
Paulo Medeiros is with FCT - University of the Azores, Ponta Delgada,
Portugal.
José Manuel Cascalho is with LIACC, FCT - University of the Azores,
Ponta Delgada, Portugal.
*Correspondence: ana.is.santos@uac.pt
Cite: Ana Isabel Santos*, Dora Pereira, Nanci Botelho, Paulo Medeiros, and José Manuel Cascalho, "Robotics for Young People in AZORESminiBOT," International Journal of Information and Education Technology vol. 13, no. 1, pp. 33-41, 2023.
Copyright © 2023 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).