Robótica educativa para o desenvolvimento do pensamento computacional: um estudo numa escola rural da Colômbia

The purpose of this study is to examine the progress of computational thinking skills using educational robotics through teaching-learning activities in students in a rural area of Colombia. The intervention involved 19 children in the third, fourth, and fifth grade of primary school, aged between 7 and 12 years, with a single group of students, building and programming robots with the Lego Education WeDo 2.0 robotics kit under the active learning approach “Learning by doing”. An instrument was applied before and after the implementation of a workshop to collect data on the skills observed in the students, using a non-probabilistic sampling, by convenience. To determine the progress of the students, a Wilcoxon signed-rank test for paired samples, a non-parametric test, was performed, which revealed a significant improvement in the computational thinking skills of the rural school students, especially pattern recognition, decomposition and generalization. In the case of data analysis, and algorithmic thinking, slower progress was evidenced, taking into account the degree of difficulty in appropriating totally new concepts that require more time of pedagogical mediation to achieve optimal results in the process, also taking into consideration that the children had no previous experience in computer programming and robotics.