The idea of educational use of robots is originates from Seymour Papert's work in the 1980s. Papert's contructivist ideas (Papert, 1980) came alive after widespreed use of robots in classrooms in several countries. In the last decade, interest in studying the use robotics for educational purposes (ER – Educational Robotics) has increased significantly. There is an increasing number of articles created with new research ideas as well as confirmation of results, demonstrating that this technology has significant potential to impact education. (Educational Robotics is closely related with at least four very popular areas of pedagogical research: constructivist learning (Papert, 1980), STEM (Khine, 2017), computational thinking (Catlin, Woollard, 2014) and problem-solving).

In this lecture we would like to present a brief overview of the situation of Hungarian case and share an interesting experiment of using floor-robots in the classrooms.

According to the Digital Education Strategy of Hungary (2016), (a) programming of robots (at least block-coding) must be taught between year 5 and year 8 (b) there should be at least one robot per 3 student in every computer lab. However due to strict financial constraints there is a very few robots are used in schools. There are several individual and social initiatives in place to improve this situation. The "Wandering robots" projects, initiated by a Hungarian teacher János Fári in 2017 build on the following procedure: some floor-robots (tts group's Blue-bot) were sent to selected schools for 2-3 weeks, and they could introduce this tools into classroom activities this period. After this introduction and use they were required to send robots to the next school. In our research we examine how the teachers evaluate of effects and usefulness of this learning method.

The main research questions were the following:

• How much and in which lessons could they use the robot activities, and how could they be integrated into curriculum?
• What was the most important pedagogical purpose of robot activities in the classrooms?
• How many teachers/students in schools were involved with this project?
• What type of activities/tools was designed and produced during work with robots in the classrooms (exercise-books, mats etc.?

After the successful implementation of this project, two similar projects has been started recently in Hungary: one for Micro:bits and other one for Edison robots (both of them are initiated and supported by individuals).

We hope, that the successful implementation of these projects will be fostering educational robotics in more schools, and can be a good practice for other countries in similar situation.

Our literature review gave a small number of articles regarding empirical research use of floor robots and the teachers’ attitudes and opinions about it (Alimisis, 2012; Sullivan-Bers, 2015; Angel-Fernandez, Markus, 2018). We have conducted research with online questionnaries. The survey was carried out with the participation 59 teachers (86,4% female) from primary schools all around the country. The survey has 13 questions about use of robots, attitudes of students, type of lessons, pedagogical purposes etc., and 3 questions with some background information. Based on result of the online survey we have interviewed 10 selected teachers to get some more detailed feedback about their attitudes and opinions about project. In evaluation of survey we used basic statistics and qualitative methods for evaluation of interviews. The more detailed analysis of findings will be presented in conference lecture.

The primary purpose of this study was to determine whether the use of educational robots (floor-robots) in a limited period has an impact on different classrooms in primary education and attitudes in the context of elementary education. In summary our results confirm that the motivational effect of using new tools (ie. robots) for students’ learning is very high. Several teachers were involved with the projects, they used floor-robots mostly in Math (57,6%) and Reading (40,2%) classes, 10-15 times. 95% of teachers responded, that they found it very useful (5 on 5 point Likert-scale). After successful first steps they feel inspired to seek new possibilities and financial support to spread over ER in their own school. The other feedback refers to improving knowledge sharing between teachers of different subject and their knowledge about students’ thinking. Results indicated, that educational robotics can be one of the effective tools for implementation of STEM topics into curriculum of elementary level. In current research we are going to examine the effects of using floor-robots regarding of student’s problem-solving skills and computational thinking.

S. Papert, Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas. New York, NY, USA: Basic Books, Inc., 1980. M. Khine, Robotics in STEM Education: Redesigning the Learning Experience. 2017. 10.1007/978-3-319-57786-9. J. M. Angel-Fernandez J.M., Markus, V., Towards a Definition of Educational Robotics, In: Philipp Zech, Justus Piater (Eds.) Proceedings of the Austrian Robotics Workshop, Innsbruck University Press, 2018 Catlin, D.. Woollard, J. Educational Robots and Computational Thinking. 4th TRTWR & RIE 2014 - 4th International Workshop "Teaching Robotics & Teaching with Robotics" & 5th International Conference "Robotics in Education" 2014, At Padova, Italy D. Alimisis, “Robotics in education & education in robotics: Shifting focus from technology to pedagogy,” in Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Robotics in Education, 2012, pp. 7–14. P. Ferrarelli, T. Lapucci, L. Iocchi, „Methodology and Results on Teaching Maths Using Mobile Robots”, in In: Ollero A., Sanfeliu A., Montano L., Lau N., Cardeira C. (eds) ROBOT 2017: Third Iberian Robotics Conference, pp. 394-406. ROBOT 2017. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 694. Springer Sullivan, A., Bers, M. (2015). Robotics in the early childhood classroom: learning outcomes from an 8-week robotics curriculum in pre-kindergarten through second grade, International Journal Technology Des Educ DOI 10.1007/s10798-015-9304-5