Early childhood education, traditionally focused on emotional and motor development, is being enriched with pedagogical initiatives that include digital skills such as programming and computational thinking. These competencies not only foster early technological literacy but also promote abilities such as problem-solving, logical thinking, and creativity.
In this context, educational robotics emerges as a key tool for teaching in the early school years. Programming robots like the Bee-Bot® allows children to learn action sequencing in a playful and practical way.
This approach makes learning more engaging and directly aligns with constructivist and constructionist theories, which position the student as an active participant in their own learning process. Additionally, educational robotics creates a space to challenge gender stereotypes by demonstrating that both girls and boys can achieve similar levels of competence in technological skills.
The article by Caballero-González and García-Valcárcel Muñoz-Repiso delves into the benefits of using programmable robots to develop computational thinking in early childhood education. Through an experimental design that included structured activities and pretest-posttest evaluations, the authors show that these tools not only enhance sequencing skills but also eliminate significant gender-based performance differences.
This study significantly contributes to the growing body of evidence supporting the implementation of educational robotics strategies in early school years, laying the foundation for future research in this promising field.
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How to cite: Caballero González, Y. A., & García-Valcárcel Muñoz-Repiso, A. (2021). Robots in the Early Childhood Education: learning to sequence actions using programmable robots. RIED. Revista Iberoamericana de Educación a Distancia, 24(1), 77–94. https://doi.org/10.5944/ried.24.1.27508
