Research On How Robot Education Impacted Students' Engineering Problem-solving Strategies

"Problem solving" is one of the 21st century skills.With the rapid development of robot education,it has become one of the training goals of robot education to cultivate students' engineering-design thinking and help them solve problems in real life by using engineering-design.Based on the concept of engineering-design and robot-teaching mode,this study designed and developed a set of robot curriculums based on the life science content of primary school,and carried out to explore the impact of robot education on students' engineering problem-solving strategies.This research use graphical visualization methods to analyze the research trend of robot education both domestic and overseas,summarizes the relevant research of cases,and the evaluation of students' engineering problem-solving method,based on the theory of teaching model and the summary of the development of robot courses,and in the form of a comprehensive activity in a primary school in Shanghai,the class hour for 17 weeks,The participants were 30 students from the fifth grade of a primary school in Shanghai,By using hybrid research method,this study collects and analyzes from the Angle of quantitative and qualitative data,evaluate the change of students engineering problem－solving strategy.The results show that:(1)robot education can improve students'understanding of engineering-design process in this study.As the course progresses,students can write more engineering-design steps,and more effective sequences are formed between different steps.(2)when students design,construct and evaluate engineering-design problem solutions,their problem-solving strategies conform to the logic of engineering design and have certain systematicness and iteration after teaching.Students begin to design solutions,build models,test,and evaluate around problems and requirements but still have the tendency of "non-sequential participants";(3)the robot education based on engineering design can help students to learn life science knowledge and generate positive feedback to the course.Students have a positive learning motivation for this course,hope to learn more robot courses,and are willing to use the knowledge and methods learned in the curriculums to solve problems in life.The accumulation of students' problem solving path data can help us better understand students' engineering problem solving strategies and support the matching of teaching and learning styles in robot education.Through the analysis of experimental data and interviews with students,this study found the deficiencies of course content and teaching in cultivating students' engineering problem-solving strategies.It is suggested that future research should explore the change of students' engineering problem-solving strategies from more perspectives,improve robot teaching and curriculum design,improve students' understanding of engineering-design process,and improve their ability to solve problems with engineering-design methods.