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.