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Nora Fernandez Fernandez
The European project FERTILE celebrates its first year. Its main objective is to foster computational thinking skills in students, mixing educational robotics with art. In particular, the idea is to do it by combining face-to-face learning with online learning. The project has the participation of RoboticsLabURJC, a group of robotics researchers that has been working since the year 2000.
According to José María Cañas Plaza, professor of Telematics Engineering at the URJC and main researcher of the FERTILE project, "in this first year the set of educational tools that can be useful in this area has been studied, with special emphasis on robotic simulators ”. In addition, "a methodology has been designed to apply this union of art and robotics in the classroom with secondary and primary school students."
Currently, robots capable of playing music, painting on the floor or dancing are being explored. "We are proposing these practices for teachers and the idea is to transfer them to students to make technical disciplines more attractive by combining them with art," says Cañas.
It will be in this second year of the project that pilot experiences will be carried out with real students from various schools and institutes in various European countries.
In this sense, the main innovation of this FERTILE approach is the way to synthesize the arts with robotics to promote Computational Thinking. The idea is, therefore, that students create robots capable of representing behaviors, scenes, poems or writing a story in a creative and original way.
The FERTILE project brings together researchers and educators from various countries, such as Greece, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Spain. The launch meeting was in May 2022 at the ETS Telecommunications Engineering of the URJC, on the Fuenlabrada campus.
More information on the project website FERTILE.