Dra. Seckel-Santis, Maria

The purpose of this study is to analyze the reflections of future kindergarten teachers when designing didactic sequences with the use of the bee-bot robot. A qualitative methodological design was followed to achieve this objective, collecting the data through a written record prepared by the participants from collaborative work. A total of 25 future teachers participated, forming six working groups. The data were analyzed with the content analysis technique, considering the criteria of didactic suitability–epistemic, cognitive, interactional, mediational, affective, and ecological–and their respective components. The results suggest that at the moment prior to the design of the didactic sequences, the reflections of the groups of future teachers are related only to some criteria, while, in the design of the proposed teaching and learning process, the units of analysis were related to all six criteria. With the results obtained, it is concluded that a future implementation and observation of the design of didactic sequences by the participants would allow the participants to consider more components of the criteria when reflecting. In addition, it is concluded that training that contemplates the criteria of didactic suitability, would also allow future teachers to deepen their reflections, guiding them with these tools.

The social, scientific and technological development of recent years has encouraged the incorporation of computational thinking in the school curriculum of various countries progressively, starting from early childhood education. This research aims to characterize future kindergarten teachers’ traits of didactic-mathematical and computational knowledge presented when solving and posing robotics problems. Firstly, aspects of the mathematical and computational knowledge of the participants (97 students of the subject of Didactics of Mathematics of the Degree in Early Childhood Education at a Spanish university) were identified when they solved problems as users of the Blue-Bot didactic robot. Secondly, we analyzed their justifications for reflecting on the design of robotics problems. The results indicate that future teachers present characteristics of didactic mathematical knowledge when solving and designing robotics problems, although errors and am- biguities are evident, especially in the procedures and representations of the programming. These shortcomings significantly influence the didactic suitability of the robotics problems they design. From a future perspective, in the training of future teachers, it is considered relevant to incorporate didactic-mathematical and computational knowledge that allows them to develop logical, spatial and computational thinking.

Computational thinking in the educational environment has awaken a rising interest, having been included as part of the curricula from the very beginnings of education. Programmable robots have become a valuable positive resource in order to succeed in the development of computational thinking, demanding proper training from kindergarten teachers and trainees in order to be able to teach robotic programming. This article has the purpose to 1) identify the frequent errors made by trainee kindergarten teachers when solving a series of robotic problems in a computational thinking module, which develops in the course of Didactics of Mathematics and 2) determine the level of comprehension of the robot concept acquired by the trainees when solving robotics problems. The research developed in a qualitative methodology manner; the data used for this article were collected through the solving of fve robotic problems and an open-ended question that had to be answered by each of the 25 participants individually. The results showed that, in general, the most frequent error appeared in problems in which movements were set in a Euclidean space of two dimensions. That is to say, the problems’ solving required a selection of diferent commands: turn, moving forward and/or backwards. Moreover, more than half of the participants who answered the open-ended question succeeded in owning the robot concept once they had solved the problems.