How to engage young learners and introduce them to coding? The most fun option is by playing games. Starting 2023, ST volunteers have developed a “Storyteller Robot” project and brought it to schools in the suburbs of Milan. By using a robot, this project helps young students in kindergartens and primary schools understand what coding means.
The goal of this project, like others developed by ST, is to promote knowledge of STEM subjects and careers in the scientific and technological fields. These skills are increasingly in demand in the job market. Additionally, this type of activity helps develop soft skills such as communication and teamwork from an early age, enhancing cohesion among participants.
Bridging the Digital Divide: the birth of the project “Narrativa Digitale”
The project Narrativa digitale (“Digital storytelling”) was born in 2023, thanks to the idea of some ST employees (Achille Colombo, Lavinia Fabrello, Luca Proverbio, Ramona Scaramuzzino, and Bruno Zappia), with the support of the colleagues Luisa Fracassini, Antonella Redaelli, and Ornella Tavilla. Its main objective is the reduction of the digital divide – a goal to which ST has always been committed through various types of knowledge dissemination and training activities:
- The ST Foundation is ST’s non-profit corporate foundation that aims to bridge the digital divide through education in communities around the world. It operates in 12 countries across Europe, Asia and Africa and is led by volunteers who design tailor-made programs for different groups of people, including children, adults, people with disabilities and seniors.
- The STEM your way program aims to inspire the next generation to study science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), thus developing the knowledge and skills needed to succeed in a technology-driven world. Many ST sites organize or take part at events to promote STEM education and allow young people to explore STEM-related careers. For example, ST Italy organizes innovation days for students in Naples and participates at the Maker Faire in Rome. In Singapore we host secondary school pupils and teachers to promote careers in electronics, while in France we take part at Extraordinary Factory (L’Usine Extraordinaire). STEM Your way also includes local events that are aimed at engaging younger people and connect with local communities, including local schools.
Through these activities ST employees make their skills and time available, excited by the idea of ​​transmitting their technical and cultural background built up during the years of work in the company. Some of the volunteers of Narrativa Digitale have twenty years of experience in volunteering for ST Foundation and this helped them to design the “Storyteller Robot” project for schools.
In particular, this activity aims to introduce coding to primary schools as part of the broader objective to expand the reach and audience of our events and instilling a love for technology and STEM subjects even in preschool age.
The idea of ​​creating a training opportunity in primary schools was sparked thanks to a fortuitous conversation that one of our volunteers had with a teacher from an elementary school in Milan. The goal was to inaugurate the project in 2024 and then expand it. The Storyteller Robot has not only been used for activities in schools but also during an ST event held in Monza in October 2024, which was mainly aimed at primary and secondary school students.
The heart of the project: ST volunteers and young learners
The trainers who took part in the project Narrativa Digitale are ST employees (Ramona Scaramuzzino, Luca Proverbio, Lavinia Fabrello, Achille Colombo and Bruno Zappia, Domenico Genova, Laura Bonini) and have several years of experience in school activities. They also followed specific training (dedicated to a previous project – Coding and Learning), which was the result of a collaboration between ST Foundation, Università Cattolica and Fondazione ACRA.
Before being launched, the project was submitted for approval to the teaching staff of the beneficiary schools. At each meeting there were two trainers and the class teaching staff, who already knew the students, and gave useful advice on how to involve the children in the various activities. To date, the participants have been 8–9-year-old students from elementary schools (two classes from Cornaredo and one from Cerro Maggiore) and 5–6-year-old children from the last year of kindergarten (a class in Cerro Maggiore and one in San Vittore Olona), thus involving more than one hundred children. Extending the audience so much was a first for ST, which before this occasion had never addressed kindergarten children.
A fundamental requirement of the organized activities is the small size of the groups involved. The activity is a team game, which could not work properly if there is no effective communication between participants. The small number of groups formed favored the collaboration and proactive participation of each student.
The main activity: coding a tale
The Storyteller Robot is a little robot mouse with a button panel on its back and, in this activity, is programmed by children to move in space and tell a story. The mouse does not have a voice, but children lend him one, as he moves around on a path, from one episode of the story to another.
This mouse is 10 cm long and can memorize 40 commands. Specifically, the robot moves on an obstacle course, with the aim of proceeding from point A to point B while avoiding obstacles. The “problem solving” work is done at the desk in a group on sheets of paper while the verification part is done on the carpet where the children take turns to impersonate the robot. During the activity, programming sections and subsequent verification of the code are carried out: all the children can try to insert the commands, after having defined them on paper with their classmates, and see the result.
Each meeting is characterized by a theoretical introduction given by our volunteers, followed by the practical activity, in which ideas and results are shared. Specifically, the activities are generally structured in four lessons:
- First Lesson: Coding unplugged
During the first lesson, the goal is to introduce children to the concept of coding without the use of digital devices, that is “coding unplugged”. Children learn to write code on paper that will allow them to perform a mission and move in space. Then a child impersonates the robot and moves on a modular foam mat: the moves are based on the instructions given by the classmates, who read the code previously written together.
- Second Lesson: Programming the Robot
The “Robot Minstrel” device appears for the first time. The children receive recipes for which ingredients are needed. These ingredients are represented in a paper grid on which the mouse will then have to move.
In this case the children write the code together on paper and then validate it via the mouse who will have to move and collect all the ingredients for the recipe.
- Third Lesson: representing a story
In this lesson, the ST volunteers are absent, and it is the class teacher who leads the activity. The goal is to stimulate creativity and group work through a real story. The teacher tells a story and the children, divided into 6 groups, must produce drawings representing a part of the story. Each group produces 2 drawings, for a total of 12 drawings to then apply on the paper grid that corresponds to 12 stages of the story.
- Fourth Lesson: coding and storytelling
During the last meeting, ST volunteers return to integrate the coding with the story of the previous lesson.
The children, still divided into 6 groups, write the code for the two stages of the story assigned to them (which correspond to the two drawings they created). Each group writes the code for their part of the story and checks it with the mouse on the grid. After this planning and verification phase, everyone reads the story together and moves the mouse, joining the various parts of the code written by the different groups.
Each group has to carefully plan, through the code, the movements of the mouse starting from the point where it had stopped in the previous stage. For this activity precision, collaboration and problem-solving are essential, in case it is necessary to adjust the code along the way.
Beyond the Code: the human impact
The results of the activities are multiple and touch different spheres of both learning and communication. Through questionnaires, we collected feedback from children, volunteers and teaching staff.
The children’s feedback was more than positive and 98% of them appreciated the proposed activities. All the children were able to collaborate fruitfully with their classmates to create a successful outcome. They learned to divide a problem into several parts and then tackle it as a whole and they experienced that what is planned on paper does not always work during the testing part. They also learned that a mistake is not a failure but that sometimes it can even be an opportunity to improve something that already exists or create something new.
The answers to the questionnaire also revealed a surprising aspect: regardless of the class and school, for most children, interacting and working with their classmates was the greatest challenge. This analysis may provide ideas for the teachers who participated, who could develop similar activities to foster cohesion among students.
The volunteers also learned from the training experiences. For example, they understood how fundamental it is to be able to manage the “dead time” between one shift and another: currently, in fact, each group must wait its turn to interact with the robot. To improve, it is necessary to optimize this wait and make it more productive and fun, introducing secondary activities for the groups that are waiting their turn.
What moved us the most was seeing how this collective activity could create inclusion among children and involve those with disabilities. Classmates helped each other to complete the activity and achieve the goals.
Coding everywhere
The main goal of this activity was to spark interest in scientific subjects, while playing a game. The main target was students, but teachers and parents were also enthusiastic. With this project we demonstrated how a single methodology can be used in different ways: coding can be taken out of the usual computer science class and mixed with other subjects such as language learning, technology, art, geography and civic education.
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