Life Experiences and Emotions Around Robotics in Teachers: An Observation From Initial Education

Introduction

Society 4.0, with the deployment of Artificial Intelligence and the Internet of Things, among others, implies new ways of buying/selling, communicating, producing, and searching for information, as well as new ways of connecting with the environment and with others, involving changes in temporalities and experiences. In this way, the profound transformations proposed by the 21st century impact the ways of training practising educators and the teaching/learning processes that take place in the classroom (Popova et al., 2018; Furman et al., 2020). In this sense, technological advances imply a strong massiveness and proximity to different technological devices that translate into significant advances, implying a potential redefinition of global institutions and students' interactions with them (Chang & Hung, 2019; Wu et al., 2019).

From there, understanding the pedagogical potential of robotics and Digital Technologies, and integrating them into teaching strategies has become the great challenge of current education. Its mediating function is found precisely in the fact that they modify the technological context of traditional education and frame it in a profound transformation of learning processes, with a less rigid, more exploratory character, with a more flexible distribution of work, a permanent invitation to collaboration with others, and an ideal means to experiment and reflect on the ways of learning (Badía & Monereo, 2008).

The pioneering article by J. M. Wing (2006) significantly contributes to thinking about the cognitive and educational implications of programming at an academic and institutional level. In it, computational thinking is defined as an approach to problem-solving using decomposition strategies, algorithm design, abstraction, and logical reasoning (Wing, 2006). Thus, it is detached from computer science and becomes a set of skills and competencies that anyone can develop and work on. With the advent of the integrative perspective known internationally as Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) for the integration of learning and teaching of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, computational thinking is playing a central role in many of the international educational proposals at the initial and primary levels (Grover and Pea, 2013). Since then, at a global level in the educational community, the use of Robots and block programming has been proliferating, adapted to the first school ages, as a way for research and educational innovation (Department for Education, 2013; FECYT et al., 2016; Benton et al., 2017; Leidl et al., 2017; Sáez & Cózar, 2017; Sullivan & Bers, 2016; Sullivan et al., 2017).