Supporting Educators to Co-Design Interdisciplinary Projects Integrating Educational Robotics and Arts

Abstract

The growing call to foster interdisciplinary learning has found educators struggling to co-design learning across disciplinary boundaries. Aiming to contribute to the area of interdisciplinary learning design, we explored how to support educators in co-designing interdisciplinary projects integrating Educational Robotics (ER) and Arts, hereafter called Artful ER projects. Our research included developing the "FERTILE" Learning Design methodology as a conceptual tool scaffolding the integration of discipline-oriented viewpoints while educators co-design. Acknowledging that one of the challenges in interdisciplinary collaboration derives from educators’ different intentions for students’ learning outcomes, the "FERTILE" methodology introduces Computational Thinking (CT) skills as an Artful ER project’s primary learning outcome. In this line, the “FERTILE” methodology adapts the Creative Computational problem-solving model, which has been reported to cultivate CT skills through its staged process. Furthermore, we developed the "FERTILE" Community Platform as an online environment providing two-fold support to educators as designers of interdisciplinary learning. The "FERTILE" Community Platform incorporates community functionalities that address collaboration practicalities while educators co-design. Additionally, it integrates authoring functionalities scaffolding educators in designing Artful ER projects based on the "FERTILE" Learning Design methodology. This paper explores how the authoring functionalities of the "FERTILE" Community Platform support educators in designing interdisciplinary learning. We report on a pilot study conducted with Greek and Spanish educators. In this study, we applied a mixed-method research design with a quantitative strand adopting indicators from the Usability Metric for User Experience (UMUX) model and a qualitative strand providing insights into participants’ perceptions. The findings indicate that scaffolding disciplinary elaboration (e.g., robot technical requirements and art forms) and systematising interdisciplinary context (e.g., through project categories) may trigger educators’ mutual understanding. The participants endorsed authoring functionalities that adopted high contextualisation levels for learning design representation to communicate their design ideas across disciplinary boundaries. Also, the participants valued CT skills as the primary outcome of interdisciplinary learning, indicating that CT skills’ cultivation may be the broker among disciplines and trigger educators to overcome disciplinary barriers. Finally, we discuss the findings and implications for refining the "FERTILE" Community Platform as an online environment for educators co-designing Artful ER projects.