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.