Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to report on the concept map evaluation of an innovative STEM project for 4- and 5-year-old children. An American university research team developed and implemented a 3-month pilot program using engineering and robotics as the platform for teaching programming and problem solving. The engineering-focused lessons used a developmentally, age appropriate robot (KIBO) to teach simple programming skills while practicing a problem solving process designed to transfer to other settings. Researchers delivered the twice weekly lessons, integrated into the adopted prekindergarten curriculum, and implemented as part of the established center rotations. Researchers used child interviews and concept mapping as a measure of children’s knowledge of robotics and problem solving to estimate growth in their knowledge over time. Results indicated that the children exhibited increased knowledge of robotics, 93 %, and problem solving, 42 %, mostly resulting from the increased use of propositions and cross-links.
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Acknowledgement
The Crawford Early Childhood Research and Education Distinguished Professor Fund made possible the RAPP project through a generous gift to the University of North Florida Foundation and the Florida Institute of Education by Toni and Andy Crawford.
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McLemore, B., Wehry, S., Carlson, D., Monroe-Ossi, H., Fountain, C., Cosgrove, M. (2016). Using Concept Mapping to Assess 4- and 5-Year Old Children’s Knowledge in the Robotics and Programming for Prekindergarten Project. In: Cañas, A., Reiska, P., Novak, J. (eds) Innovating with Concept Mapping. CMC 2016. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 635. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45501-3_23
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