Control Technology in Elementary Education

Control technology is a new learning environment whichoffers the opportunity to take up the economic andeducational challenge of enabling people to adapt to newtechnologies and use them to solve problems. Giving youngchildren (and also adults) easy access to control technologyintroduces them to a learning environment where they canbuild their knowledge across a range of topics. As theybuild and program their own automata and robots, they learnto solve problems, work incollaboration, and be creative.They also learn more about science, electronics, physics,computer literacy, computer assisted manufacturing, and soon.This book, based on a NATO Advanced Research Workshop in theSpecial Programme on Advanced Educational Technology,presents a cross-curricular approach to learning aboutcontrol technology. The recommended methodology is activelearning, where the teacher's role is to stimulate thelearner to build knowledge by providing him/her withappropriate materials (hardware and software) andsuggestions to develop the target skills. The results areencouraging, although more tools are needed to help thelearner to generalize from his/her concrete experiment incontrol technology as well as to evaluate its effect on thetarget skills. The contributions not only discussepistemological controversies linked to such learningenvironments as control technology, but also report on thestate of the art and new developments in the field andpresent some stimulating ideas.