Promoting STEM via Robotics Based Programming

There has been much criticism of the lack of programming in secondary level ICT teaching provision in Northern Ireland. There are more than 900 companies in the ICT sector and many of these are international organisations. It is against this backdrop that we need to promote secondary level programming education and to do so, we ran three separate 3-day interactive workshops (outside of classroom time) in three different schools covering different demographics, under a funded project entitled Widening Access Robotics Programming (WARP). The aim was to give the students a feel for what they would be doing when studying both Software Systems Development and other STEM subjects in Higher Education (HE), in a fun and novel way. This was achieved by learning industry standard programming languages (e.g. Java) and using them to program a Lego Mindstorms EV3 robot. This visual demonstration inspired students to learn programming and helped students understand programming in a practical manner. The feedback from the students showed that 88% of students were positive about their learning throughout the course and no students were unhappy with the course.