Teaching (with) robots in secondary schools: some new and not-so-new pedagogical problems

Research on the teaching of programming has shown that novice programmers often come up against significant difficulties in understanding programming concepts as well as in finding solutions to even elementary programming problems. One of the basic strategies which has been adopted in order to confront this problem, were programming languages and environments created with the specific aim to make both the teaching and learning processes of programming easier. A typical category of these types of environments consists of systems where the novice programmer manipulates real entities such as robots and automatic mechanisms. In this research we present a series of pilot lessons for an introduction to programming with the help of Lego Mindstorms and the visual programming environment ROBOLAB. The research was carried out on Greek secondary school students in the 9th and 10th grades. We present the initial results, which clearly show the advantages of this environment over the standard ones conventionally used, as well as some problems.