RoboLoco Erasmus Project

Project Title

RoboLoco

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for school education

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2020

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: ICT – new technologies – digital competences; Key Competences (incl. mathematics and literacy) – basic skills

Project Summary

With the increasing importance of technology in every day life it has become necessary to rethink the way we prepare young people in school for their careers. We already have a severe lack of skilled workers in Europe when it comes to jobs in the IT sector, however, basic IT-related skills such as computational thinking are needed in a vast number of jobs that are supported by computers.
In recent years, Computational Thinking (CT) and coding skills have been promoted by educational stakeholders as skills that are as fundamental for all as numeracy and literacy. A number of initiatives addressing CT and coding/programming have been carried out, both at international and national levels. Despite the high levels of interest in developing CT skills among schoolchildren, however, a range of issues and challenges still needs to be addressed for the effective integration of CT in compulsory education. In fact CT is considered by OECD (2018) as an emerging competence domain in schools. The increasing and evolving role of CT in problem solving contexts is also reflected in the PISA 2021 framework: students should be able to demonstrate CT skills like pattern recognition, defining algorithms or decomposition.
Unfortunately educational systems are slow to adapt to the needs, which is why it is necessary to aid with initiatives that involve teachers with the teaching knowledge, learning experts with the theoretical educational foundations and partners with the practical knowledge. The project RoboLoco is such an initiative with the potential to drastically improve the skills of thousands of students.
In the RoboLoco project a consortium of experts plans to create engaging learning situations for students by designing a game that motivates them to acquire computational thinking. This is done through immersing them in a robot race in which they program whacky robots to race against each other on a 3D race track. Programming them mainly means thinking of algorithms that let the robots react to each other and to the race track. This could be dodging obstacles but also pushing other robots aside or evading the attack of another robot.
The game will run on mobile phones so that it can be available on the personal smartphones of students and so that they will be inspired to play for fun. We will also add pedagogic materials for teachers which will help them integrate the game as a learning tool in class.
The game will always give the player the opportunity to analyze the race and understand what went wrong or right and what could be improved in the robot’s race program. In addition it will include instructional videos and texts that are never forced on the learner but offer optional hints that can make the robots perform better. The excitement of competing against friends paired with the fun of improving a robot’s performance in every race will motivate the learners to increase their coding skills and to acquire computational thinking skills which are essential in an increasing number of work environments.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 189697 Eur

Project Coordinator

NORD UNIVERSITET & Country: NO

Project Partners

• SOU Jane Sandanski Strumica
• Ingenious Knowledge GmbH
• Direção Regional de Educação