Control Technology in Elementary Education

Control technology is a new learning environment which
offers the opportunity to take up the economic and
educational challenge of enabling people to adapt to new
technologies and use them to solve problems. Giving young
children (and also adults) easy access to control technology
introduces them to a learning environment where they can
build their knowledge across a range of topics. As they
build and program their own automata and robots, they learn
to solve problems, work incollaboration, and be creative.
They also learn more about science, electronics, physics,
computer literacy, computer assisted manufacturing, and so
on.
This book, based on a NATO Advanced Research Workshop in the
Special Programme on Advanced Educational Technology,
presents a cross-curricular approach to learning about
control technology. The recommended methodology is active
learning, where the teacher’s role is to stimulate the
learner to build knowledge by providing him/her with
appropriate materials (hardware and software) and
suggestions to develop the target skills. The results are
encouraging, although more tools are needed to help the
learner to generalize from his/her concrete experiment in
control technology as well as to evaluate its effect on the
target skills. The contributions not only discuss
epistemological controversies linked to such learning
environments as control technology, but also report on the
state of the art and new developments in the field and
present some stimulating ideas.