What Pre-Conceptions Do Students Have About Sensors? Preliminary Results*

Education that prepares young people for their future lives should naturally take into account the current epoch and its technological developments. The integration of robotics into everyday life is becoming more and more commonplace. Students thus arrive at school with certain ideas, not always good ones, about how things or robots in their environment work. This subconsciously acquired knowledge, the so-called pre-concepts, has been changing considerably over the last years. Teaching materials, learning objectives and education in general should respond to or take account of this change. However, there is no precise information about these learner pre-concepts. In our dissertation research, we therefore focus on students' pre-concepts about the robots that students come to class with. In this paper, we examine specific preconcepts about sensors and how students explain their operation. We used mixed methods data collection and analysis, where we analyzed questionnaire data from 48 students aged 11-13. In this paper we present the 4 different pre-concepts identified.