Exploring the development of mental rotation and computational skills in elementary students through educational robotics

Interest in educational robotics has increased over the last decade. Through various approaches, robots are being used in the teaching and learning of different subjects at distinct education levels. The present study investigates the effects of an educational robotic intervention on the mental rotation and computational thinking assessment in a 3rd grade classroom. To this end, we carried out a quasi-experimental study involving 24 third-grade students. From an embodied approach, we have designed a two-hour intervention providing students with a physical environment to perform tangible programming on Bee-bot. The results revealed that this educational robotic proposal aimed at map-reading tasks leads to statistically significant gains in computational thinking. Moreover, students who followed the Bee-bot-based intervention achieved greater CT level compared to students following a traditional instruction approach, after controlling student's prior level. No conclusive results were found in relation to mental rotation