Teachers’ Reasons to Join a Community About Educational Robotics and STEAM: A Swiss Experience

Today we live in a digital society that requires the acquisition of new skills related to computer science, such as computational thinking or coding skills, as well as cross-curricular skills, such as communication, collaboration and creativity. A possible tool that allows fostering these skills in schools is educational robotics. However, the question is how to bring educational robotics into schools? Indeed, only a few teachers are conducting educational robotics activities in their classrooms. This is where Roteco comes in. We aim to create a community of teachers interested in educational robotics and to offer training in this field in order to increase the presence of robotics in the classroom. As part of the project, a teacher training concept, a collaboration platform and various teaching resources were developed. This paper presents the project and the results of a survey with 87 teachers about the reasons why they joined the Roteco community and how they contribute to its growth. The main findings show that teachers joined Roteco to remain informed about robotics, to be inspired by other teachers and to get didactic resources. Only a few of them also joined in order to communicate with other teachers or to share their own materials. In order to create a vibrant community is however important to motivate teachers to be more active.