Empowering Future Innovators: 5 Reasons to Introduce Early STEM Education Robotics to Your Elementary Learners
Introducing robotics at an early age fosters essential growth and self-expression in children, tapping into their cognitive, critical thinking, and creative potential. Providing early STEM education robotics helps young learners view themselves as creators of technology and innovators in their own educational journey.
What are the benefits of STEM robotics? In the foundational years of childhood, it’s important to offer a fun and hands-on approach to engage with technology and engineering concepts. By incorporating unplugged and interactive robotics experiences, these future creators, designers, and engineers better understand and explore the world around them. Empowering future innovators with early STEM education robotics can truly transform their learning experience and shape their future careers.
5 Reasons to Introduce Early STEM Education Robotics to Your Young Engineers
1. Hands-on Opportunities Develop Critical Thinking and Problem Solving Skills
Robotics challenges students to engage in critical thinking and solve complex problems
When early learners experiment and engage with early STEM education robotics, they transform into engineers and storytellers. By building upon their robot with motors, sensors and modules, they create meaningful and personalized projects that unlock their imagination and enhance their problem-solving skills. And by creating simple coding sequences with programmable wooden building blocks, they watch their stories come to life through programming. This process becomes even more impactful as children grasp the concepts of if/then logic and engage with the engineering design process.
Related Post: Why KIBO is the Best Robot for Early STEM Education Robotics
2. Robotics is a Bridge Between Theory and Application
Early STEM education robotics provide students with a hands-on, age-appropriate way to apply abstract STEM and Computer Science concepts to real-world projects
With KIBO, the screen-free STEAM robot, and it’s block-based coding, children turn abstract coding concepts into tangible, physical actions. The hands-on approach of this STEM educational robot kit helps young learners grasp programming concepts quickly, naturally, and in a playful way. They realize they can control technology by directing the robots’ movements, sounds, and sensors, giving them the freedom to express their creativity through coding.
In this cross-curricular example, a child explores the art and culture of the Ndebele people of Southern Africa. She decorated her KIBO robot as a Ndebele doll, creates a dance sequence, and plays drums to accompany the movement of the dance. This geography seamlessly integrates coding, robotics, art, crafts, design, music and more!
Related Post: Investing in STEM Education Robotics Kits that Grow with Your Students
3. Engaging, Screen-Free Learning Through Fun, Hands-On Play with STEM Education Robotics
Early STEM education robotics keeps kids active and off screens while they explore engineering and programming
Children are naturally curious and eager to explore and understand the world around them. Their instinct is to find joy and wonder in learning, so combining fun, interactive play with the trial-and-error approach to programming helps them learn and grow. Often, the most rewarding moments for a child come when they solve a problem on their own. Movement and play are especially essential for learning in early childhood.
This playful example of playful learning with took place at the Kohl Children’s Museum in IL, where kids created mazes and worked together to get KIBO through the maze! They collaborated to develop coding sequences, test, debug and create all over again, all while being active and having fun in the process.
Related Post: Innovative Ways to Integrate Coding with STEM Education Robotics Curriculum for Elementary Students
4. Developing Essential 21st Century Skills In and Out of the Classroom
STEM education robotics provide an inviting, engaging platform for children to develop essential 21st Century Skills
Coding is becoming as essential to work, education, and culture as literacy was in past centuries. While not every child needs to become a computer programmer, learning to code equips them with the tools to participate in a world increasingly shaped by technology. Teaching children to code gives them fluency in a new set of tools for self-expression.
KIBO offers an inviting, engaging platform for children to begin their journey into creating with code, where children can create with technology – tell stories, create characters, and explore the world around them.
By offering children opportunities to experience coding – whether in in classrooms, makerspaces, libraries, enrichment centers, museums (anywhere!) – young engineers are gaining invaluable skills that will enhance their education and provide unlimited future career opportunities.
5. Don’t Overlook Soft Skills and SEL Development!
STEM robotics projects promote teamwork and help build collaboration skills
Engaging, cross-curricular STEM activities not only enhance students’ learning but also support their social-emotional learning (SEL) and is a foundation of KIBO’s curriculum. Our curriculum draws on the pioneering work of our co-founder, Dr. Marina Bers, who developed the Positive Technological Development (PTD) framework for designing technology experiences in early childhood. PTD is an interdisciplinary approach that emphasizes how hands-on robotics can promote positive childhood behaviors.
STEM education robotics also encourages essential SEL skills, such as persistence and “grit”. Engaging with robotics and coding involved work through the engineering design process, which encourages children to:
- Identify a problem
- Imagine and plan a solution
- Build and test their creation
- Share their work with peers
In this process, things won’t always work as intended – ask any engineer! The goal is to help students embrace testing, troubleshooting, debugging, and refining their work, focusing on continuous improvement rather than simply being right or wrong – thereby developing a “growth mindset.”
Conclusion
Introducing early STEM education robotics to your elementary learners isn’t just about coding. It’s about incorporating interactive STEM learning robots like KIBO into playful, cross-curricular lessons, where young innovators create, develop their social-emotional learning through small-group collaboration, and build persistence through the engineering design process, all while developing their STEAM, computational thinking and computer science skills!
