Eshan Maitra
Last week, an Australian education researcher has announced that, even 4-year-olds can learn the basics about robots and programming. Artificial intelligence increasingly becoming an important part of our lives. So these kind of knowledge is very much required. It’s time to ensure that generations of the future know how to handle them. This Australian researcher who is a leading authority on the application of robotics in classrooms, was not the first one who felt this need. Programming is already taught from the kindergarten in few countries already. NAO robots being added to two schools in South Australia as part of a world-first study. Also Queensland, Australia implementing compulsory coding and robotics in primary and early secondary schools from last year. But this needs to be worldwide. Programming and learning about robots are not rocket science anymore. Most of the necessary parts are way cheaper than before and easy to come by. The researcher Christina Chalmers from the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in Australia mentions, “It is really important that children have these skills early in life but we need to make it fun for them and think about how they can be creative. Coding is basically telling a computer what you want it to do through step-by-step commands. Robotics activities are very effective because they are hands-on and students get immediate feedback on whether their robot and program works or not.” Although teaching robots and complex coding to kids seems bit ambitious but she ensures that, “Preliminary findings from a current study have shown even pre-school students have gone beyond simply playing games with a NAO robot. They’ve drawn pictures of their ‘robot’ classmate and been able to explain how the robot received its coded messages wirelessly. This involved quite complex conceptual thinking by 4-year-olds as to how the robot’s behavior was being controlled.” She even inspired by saying that, “It arouses students’ curiosity in a way that fosters problem-solving… They are allowed and even at times encouraged to fail in order to work out what went wrong and learn from their failures and share and develop their ideas with other students.” “Research tells us that if kids don’t form positive attitudes towards science, math and technology early in life, they can find it difficult to engage later on,” Chalmers adds at the end.