Empowering Primary and Secondary Students in STEAM through Robotics and Coding
Lucija Marinčić, Nicoletta Pantela, Eftychia Xerou, Ana Sović Kržić · 2024
Robotics plays a significant role in numerous aspects of modern society, offering a wide range of benefits and contributing to various fields. It has a lot of potential in helping the society in the future, and because of that, it is important to study it and pass the knowledge to the younger generations following gender equality approaches.„Robogirls“ robotics workshops have been organized in several European countries in order to gain interest in robotics among school children and youth. In this paper, the feedback collected from more than 500 participants from Spain, Cyprus and Croatia are analyzed and processed and the results and conclusions are shown. The participants answered the questions about how much they liked the workshop, how much the workshop empowers their confidence in robotics and whether they want to continue with robotics in the future etc. The results show how the workshop influenced children’s interest in robotics and future careers in science or engineering. It also shows how important it is to present robotics to children in a way they can enjoy it. It is extremely important to regularly hold STEAM workshops for students in order to maintain their interest and empower them for STEAM.