Eureka! Institutional Repository

Technology has now become an integral part of human life, penetrating into all areas of our existence, now also in the field of education. In the context of the effort to develop the educational process for more efficient learning results and the acquisition of skills based on social and economic developments worldwide, a new teaching approach appeared, named STEAM education. As we live in a technological age, one of the STEAM education’s goals is to bring young students closer to the emerging technologies, one of which being the field of robotics. So, with this thesis, we decided to focus on the part of STEAM education that concerns educational robotics, i.e. robotic mechanisms that can be part of a teaching class to achieve our learning goals as good and effective as possible, in the fields of STEAM but also of Computer Programming, the knowledge of which is considered essential in the 21st century. Our goal is to present 5 robotic systems, as well as their programs, which can be used in the context of STEAM education. The overall project is based on the existing literature regarding the construction and programming of robotic systems, while the activities’ implementation was carried out using the LEGO Spike Prime Educational Kit. These activities are: an automatic wheelchair, a robotic cat, a robotic arm, a sorting machine and a pattern copying machine. As a result, we had an extensive study at a theoretical level of what was mentioned earlier, delving into STEAM education and teaching methods, its relationship with educational robotics, the presentation of educational robotic systems, the analysis of the programming of LEGO Spike Prime, etc. In addition, each of the applications we mentioned above, regarding both their construction and their programming, were implemented with great outcome. The overall project had the desired results, always keeping in mind that there is always a lot of room for improvement, future proposals and further development.