Dr. Ayelet Weizman

Kibbutzim College of Education, Dep. of Industrial Engineering

Social Robots as teacher-trainers for classroom group discussions in Computational Thinking courses

Project description

Computational Thinking (CT) is an innovative pedagogy that has recently been added in many countries to the mandatory K-12 Curriculum. As a result, there is search for effective teacher training methods in CT courses for teachers who have no computer science background. In this study we propose to investigate the effectiveness of a social robot for preparing and training teachers to facilitate Computational Thinking (CT) group discussions in classroom environments, through a modelling instruction approach. The robot will be used as a facilitator in a CT course for students who are in-service teachers in various subject matters and age levels. The robot will model a CT discussion with a group of teacher-students, and then encourage them to revise the code, add new aspects of facilitation into the robot, and experience their own implementation first-hand. Later, teachers will implement their knowledge with their own students in the classroom, by facilitating CT small group discussions. We will compare a group of teacher-students who will be trained by the social robot with a control group of teacher-students at the same course, facilitated by a human facilitator. We hope to learn about the influence of a robot-facilitated training on the effectiveness of classroom group discussions.

About me

I am a lecturer at the M.Ed. program for educational technology at Kibbutzim College of Education, where I lead a track centered on robots and space education.

I hold a Ph.D. in Planetary Sciences from TAU and was a post-doc in science and technology education at Michigan State University.

My passion is about Space Education & Physical-Digital technology. I previously served as VP of education at SpaceIL, and currently serve as a member of DMars educational team. This year I lead the ISU teacher workshop "Mars-Israel", which accompanies the Amadee20 Mars Simulation in Israel. I also work partly at the MOE in the IT department.

My research interest as a Minducate fellow is focused on teachers: How they learn and use Computational Thinking in their practice, and how can we influence meaningful learning of students, by training teachers with robots based on the principles of computational thinking.