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THE «ROBOTICS INTEREST QUESTIONNAIRE» (RIQ): A TOOL TO DETECT FACTORS UNDERLYING ROBOTICS TEACHING

Abstract

The growing interest of the scientific and educational community in Educational Robotics (ER) is linked to the need to develop digital skills and computational thinking in the younger generation. Through ER it is possible to train multiple cognitive skills and not only programming skills. To this end, it is decisive to outline a new competence profile for teachers that can influence this aspect by activating ER training courses. The paper presents the «Robotics Interest Questionnaire» (RIQ), a validated questionnaire in Italian able to measure with some precision the factors involved in teaching robotics, and discusses the data collected on teachers of all levels (823 teachers). The results provide normative values useful, for example, to allow the diagnostic use of the RIQ in the startup phase of teacher training, in order to hypothesize the level possessed by the participants and orientate the didactic design and the content-methodological choices of the intervention, as well as the final evaluation of the training outcomes thanks to its ability to highlight, when used before and after, improvements in the dimensions investigated: knowledge and interest, sense of self-efficacy, problem solving and collaboration.