The digital world in our classrooms

Robotics in Children

A few years ago, our school decided to start in the ICT path and how these were being introduced into the educational world. It was a process of transformation for the whole school, starting from P3 to the older Baccalaureate students. All this involved: computers, internet connection, computer classrooms, educational robots...

Therefore, the first step taken at the center was to equip the classes with interactive digital whiteboards and with Internet connectivity, giving it a new digital classroom of the 21st century. In Kindergarten, one hour a week of computer science was also implemented to encourage and develop programming language and computational thinking.

In computer sessions, students work with Bee-bots, bee-shaped robots that are very suitable for the kindergarten stage. These work with simple commands that the students have to program in order to achieve the challenges proposed by the teachers. The children are motivated by the situations they have to solve and, in addition, they work on directionality, sequences, the spatial situation... and they do it in a playful way. All these learnings can be reinforced with APPS and web pages that we use in computer days. Another strong point is that the students learn and rectify their mistakes with their practice, as the philosopher John Dewey said: “learning by doing”, learn by doing.

This project on new technologies, robotics and IT continues at the Primary and Secondary levels. The students, as they move up the courses, learn and get to know other robots, such as the Blue-bots in the Initial Cycle or the Dash and Dot in the Middle Cycle.

This new way of working has made us think that we don't want to learn computer science or robotics but we want to learn with the new tools and integrate them into our everyday life, like another tool.