mBot’s and the Australian Curriculum

My experience with mBot’s were first used in a Problem Based learning (PBL) activity. This practice is linked with the constructivism theory for learning (Smidt et al., 2017).  PBL pedagogies present open-ended problems to students and are successful, for several purposes (Smidt et al., 2017, p. 2118).  My use with mBot’s have encouraged students to develop their critical thinking skills, a skill for the 21 st century learners (Selby et al., 2003, p. 228). This project was valuable as it was centred around knowledge acquisition and is a prerequisite to develop students’ critical thinking ability (Winterton et al., 2005). Knowledge and working memory, play major roles in the acquisition of complex cognitive skills (Winterton et al., 2005).  This inspires and creates effective thinkers for problem solving (Selby et al., 2006).

What was apparent from my mBot experience was observing the students’ reflective processes. I was attentive to their efforts on deciding what to do next, with some higher order thinkers using logical, rational, and reasonable problem solutions (Bailin et al., 1999). Some authors explain, how the critical thinking process of an individual is taught to reason in improving the solution (Paul and Elder, 2003). Thus, the analytical process of reasoning must arrive at logical, rational, and reasonable judgments, within a given framework, and must agree with specific principles of thinking (Ennis, 1984)