Using floor robots in the education of students with mild intellectual disabilities – step by step

Abstract

The use of floor robots is gaining more and more popularity in the education of elementary school children. In addition to its original purpose and function, the preparation of programming, the development of algorithmic thinking, it is also suitable for the development of many other skills (Kilianova et al., 2022), and its motivating effect on children cannot be neglected either (Uhlířová et al., 2022). One of the widely used educational robotics tool is the Bee-bot floor robot, the developmental effect of which is being investigated by more and more research, for example in the development of visual-spatial memory, among children with mild or sever intellectual disabilities, language and attention problems (Bargagna et al., 2019; Lieto et al. et al., 2017.

I have had the opportunity to use this tool daily for three years now in cooperation with the staff of Learning Disabilities Specialization at the ELTE Bárczi Gusztáv Faculty of Special Needs Education. In the course of time, I held development sessions in different age groups of students with speech-impairment and learning disabilities, during which the students solved tasks related to the subject of Hungarian language and literature by programming the floor robot. It was also an interesting learning process for me, as I was able to get to know different aspects of the use of the floor robot by dealing with the different groups, and now my attempts, which were still ideas at the beginning, have come together into conscious and planned methodical steps. In this article, I would like to present this path. By sharing my experiences gained during joint work with children, I would like to help all colleagues who feel like using the tool regularly and thoughtfully.

Keywords: floor robot, Bee-bot, learning disability, reading/reading, writing/spelling