Designing Tools and Activities for Educational Robotics in Online Learning

The COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent school closures created several challenges for teachers and students. From one day to the next, teachers had to rethink their educational activities and move to remote learning. Especially with regard to educational robotics activities, which makes large use of physical artefacts, this abrupt shift towards online learning represented a major change in how activities had to be designed and implemented. In this chapter, some experiences of online educational robotics activities carried out in compulsory schooling and teacher training are presented. The experiences are then discussed using a model for the development of educational robotics activities in order to reflect on how to design such activities that can be carried out online. The examples presented in this chapter showed there is great potential for educational robotics in online learning.