European Recommendations on Robotics and Related Issues in Education in Different Countries

This short paper describes the preliminary phase in an innovative line of research comparing educational robotics in Italy and other countries, from the perspective of media education, and based on the European Parliament recommendations to the Commission on civil law rules on robotics. More specifically, all decision processes that affect digital citizenship should have the support of children and teenagers. For these reasons, this paper looks at the work of a group of Italian high school students in the fifth year of upper secondary school, who formulated a SWOT analysis to highlight their attitudes to robotics issues in relation to the European Union recommendations. This research started in 2018 and will be repeated this academic year with Italian and Congolese students—from the Institut Supérieur des Techniques Appliquées—with a qualitative analysis to establish student attitudes to robotics issues. Qualitative analysis was selected because the SWOT analysis is already divided into information categories, revealing a variety of concepts that are grouped together from the collected data. These results will be compared with any obtained in future years in Italy and other countries, to find further potential patterns