Using an Educational Robot for Teaching Environmental Issues in Early Childhood

During the last decades, ICT tools play an increasingly important role in early childhood education. Programmable toys are among the most popular tools used. A usual form of a programmable toy is a floor robot having direction buttons on it that control its movement in space. Programmable toys are used in early childhood education in order to introduce programming, robotics, math and linguistic concepts to young children. Programmable toys may be used in inter-disciplinary activities which may also involve other subjects such as environmental education and arts. In this paper, we present an inter-disciplinary approach using a programmable toy. The approach concerns environmental education and was implemented in a kindergarten classroom with twenty-three students. The results were promising as children improved their skills in programming the device and enhanced their environmental awareness.