Robotics technologies are a significant tool in many industries. This paper presents a historical analysis of educational robots and how they apply to K-12 education from the past and potential in the future; focusing on the time period before and after the year 2000. The article concludes with future directions for curriculum and robotics in…

Eighteen interrelated, sequential lesson plans and supporting materials for teaching computer literacy at the elementary and secondary levels are presented. The activities, intended to be infused into the regular curriculum, do not require the use of a computer. The introduction presents background information on computer literacy, suggests a…

In 1969, Seymour Papert invented the first educational robot called a Turtle. It was an addition to the computer language Logo, which he'd designed in 1965 specifically for educating children. Papert did not simply invent some technology, he offered a revolutionary way of educating children. He gave teachers practical tools to realise…

How are children to prepare for an era in which work can be outsourced anywhere in the world, university graduates compete with computers and robots for jobs, and in which any number of other, unforeseeable social and economic trends may transpire? Popular discourses on educational reform talk of the need for schools and colleges to produce more…

Horror stories abound of colleges closed, faculty laid off, and liberal arts programs terminated. Families express concern about costs, students worry about debt, and society appears skeptical about whether a college education is worth it. In many of these reports, colleges and universities are to blame for their own failures. Academic programs…

Problem solving spans all grade levels and content areas, as evidenced by this compilation of projects from schools across the United States. In one project, high school girls built a solar-powered tent to serve their city's homeless population. In another project, 4th graders explored historic Jamestown to learn about the voices lost to history.…

Amidst a steady clamor about "learning loss" during the pandemic, a minority of educators have cautioned we must, in the words of Donna Haraway, "stay with the trouble," giving children space to grieve, explore, and make sense of a new reality. In this paper I interrogate what it means to stay with trouble and specifically call…

Students' relationships with their peers, teachers, and communities influence the ways in which they approach learning activities and the degree to which they benefit from them. Learning technologies, ranging from humanoid robots to text-based prompts on a computer screen, have a similar social influence on students. We envision a future in which…

Advances in technology are enabling dramatic changes in education content, delivery, and accessibility. Throughout history, new technologies have facilitated the exponential growth of human knowledge. In the early twentieth century, the focus was on the use of radios in education. But since then, innovators have seen technology as a way to improve…

In identifying a logic of commodification, commercialization, and automation as the essence of educational technology, critics of online education partake in a well-established tradition, stretching from Plato's declamations against writing in the "Phaedrus" to post war worries that television prophesied the era of the automatic student…

Play often rewards us with a thrill or a sense of wonder. But, just over the edge of play, uncanny objects like dolls, automata, robots, and realistic animations may become monstrous rather than marvelous. Drawing from diverse sources, literary evidence, psychological and psychoanalytic theory, new insights in neuroscience, marketing literature,…

Explores the history of robotics and its effects upon the manufacturing industry. Topics include robots' capabilities and limitations, the factory of the future, displacement of the workforce, and implications for management and labor. (SK)

This brief discusses human movement and robotic human movement simulators. The activity for students in grades 5-12 provides a history of robotic movement and includes making an End Effector for the robotic arms used on the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station (ISS). (MVL)

In Finland teaching of technology has traveled a long road during its 140-year history. It has gradually gone from the copying of the model series dating back to the 1860s to the building of computer controlled robots. Materials, techniques and technology have developed wildly but the pedagogic contents are restricted regrettably still often only…

The purpose of this study was to explore the codependencies of the social and technical structures that yield Wikipedia the website and Wikipedia the community. In doing so, the research investigated the implications of such a sociotechnical system for the maintenance of the project and the emergence of collective intelligence. Using a theoretical…