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Key research themes
1. How do robotics activities enhance cognitive and planning skills in educational settings?
This research theme investigates the impact of robotics-based educational interventions, especially in early and primary education, focusing on how engagement with robotic design and programming activities fosters executive functions such as planning, problem-solving, and logical reasoning. Understanding this effect is critical for integrating robotics as a pedagogical tool to support 21st-century skills development and executive function maturation in childhood learning environments.
Key finding: This study demonstrates that design thinking-based robotics activities significantly improve elementary students' planning skills as measured by the Four Disc Version of the Tower of London Test, highlighting robotics' role... Read more
Key finding: The study illustrates that transversal integration of robotics activities across the K-12 curriculum enhances not only STEM-related conceptual understanding but also social-emotional skills including collaboration and... Read more
Key finding: This work presents the design and validation of a magnetic coding robot tailored for preschoolers (ages 4-5), establishing that early-age exposure to tangible coding via educational robotics concretely supports computational... Read more
Key finding: Through a causal-comparative quantitative study, this research quantitatively confirms that using robotics with recycled materials as a pedagogical tool improves learning outcomes in elementary students particularly in... Read more
2. What conceptual and philosophical frameworks shape artistic expressions involving robotic performance?
This theme explores how robotic performance art transcends traditional anthropocentric paradigms by treating robotic agents as autonomous performers interacting within ecological and ontological networks. It addresses how robotic artefacts dissolve boundaries between organism and environment, demanding reconsiderations of agency, interaction, and co-creativity in posthuman artistic practices, thereby expanding the conceptual underpinnings of performance, embodiment, and technology.
Key finding: The article conceptualizes robotic performance as a staging privileging robotic agency to create emergent worlds characterized by co-determination between robotic and biological bodies. It advances an ecological ontology of... Read more
Key finding: This interdisciplinary art installation and dance-robotic performance experiment with emergent forms of robotic-life interactions, emphasizing unpredictability, user participation, and the hybridization of biological and... Read more
3. How is the morphological paradigm reshaping robotics design and control by integrating biological principles?
This theme highlights the paradigm shift in robotics from predominantly AI and computationally intensive approaches toward designs inspired by biological morphology, emphasizing body-environment interactions, materiality, and embodied intelligence. The morphological paradigm challenges previously dominant abstraction and specialization trends by reintegrating form, structure, and evolutionary principles to produce more adaptive, efficient, and functionally integrated robotic systems.
Key finding: The paper explicates the morphological paradigm as a fundamental epistemic and practical shift in robotics toward bio-inspired design emphasizing the role of body, material dynamics, and interaction with environment in the... Read more
Key finding: This work presents the GoGo Board as a low-cost, extensible microcontroller platform that enables physical computing integrating sensors and actuators. While not explicitly bionic, it exemplifies the tangible realization of... Read more