Integration of robotics into STEM education for facilitating environmental sustainability

Abstract

This day, increasing attention demonstrated in developing innovative tools for improved teaching and learning of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) for environmental sustainability made robotics not only an outstanding tool for hands-on learning but of general topics in educational institutions. Robotics help learners transmute abstract scientific, engineering and technological concepts into concrete one for the understanding real-world environment, hence countries like China, Japan, Russia and the United State of America organized robotic competitions for secondary school STEM subjects to cultivate in students, the intelligence and talent in the future/upcoming generation. This study is a quantitative research that investigated the feasibility of integrating robotics into STEM education to facilitate classroom instruction in secondary schools. The undergraduate and postgraduate students of two technology based universities from different continents were chosen as the respondents of the study. The study, which adopts purposive sampling technique distributed an online survey of 357 respondents for which 197 responses were retrieved and are analyzed using Statistical Package For Social Science 25.0. The results indicated that the majority of the respondents (mode, 5) agreed that robotics could be used to teach programming, problem-solving for STEM subjects, design and even music and art to learners at all levels of their education. Moreover, over 80% strongly agreed that integrating robotics in teaching and learning processes would facilitate the classroom instructions. Thus, it is high time for educators to encourage the development and implementation of robotics in the instructional processes.