ABSTRACT
Teacher education institutions are required to adequately prepare pre-service teachers to use innovative technologies and pedagogies to equip learners with competencies for a changing world beyond the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Given the relatively new and emerging field of robotics in the intermediate phase of schooling, there is a distinct lack of guidelines to inform the design of teacher training interventions. In this qualitative study, learning design principles (LDPs) were derived from the literature to inform the design of training interventions for a group of 12 pre-service teachers, as they learned about robotics and possible ways to integrate it into the Grade 4 to 6 Natural Science and Technology curriculum, by developing a series of lesson plans. The first five principles required pre-service teachers to: have a sound understanding of the affordances of robotics technology; allow for practical enactment of various pedagogical strategies when integrating robotics technology; provide opportunities for learners to create, play with, test, and reflect; use design processes in teaching integrated STEM content; and set deliberate lesson objectives for developing competencies for a changing world. In this chapter, we report on the sixth principle by acknowledging that robotics integration is dependent on pre-service teachers’ experienced knowledge, deep reflection, and collaboration.
