The effects of robotic and coding education on the STEM education attitude, basic process skills and STEM carier interest of the primary school 4th grade students

STEM education is an interdisciplinary approach which is connect science, technology, engineering and mathematics disciplines. In this progress, the main aims is to develop students' basic skills such as collaboration, communication and creativity in the context of daily life problems. Robotic and coding educations are a part of the STEM. The aim of this study was to investigate the effects of robotics and coding education on students' attitudes towards STEM education, basic skills and STEM career interests by use mBlock program and Arduino robotic set. In this study, the quasi-experimental design was used. The sample of the study was consisted of 47 students in the 4th grade of a primary school in Ortaköy district of Aksaray province in the 2019-2020 academic year. While the robotics and coding activities that is prepared by the researcher were applied to 25 students in the experimental group during 7 weeks with the mBlock program, 22 students in the control group were given normal education within the Ministery of Education. Three measurament tools which were Attitudes towards STEM Education Scale, Basic Skills Scale and STEM Career Interest Scale were used to collect quantitavive data in the experimental and control groups both pre-test and post-test. The data obtained from the pre-test and post-test were analyzed using the Mann Whitney U, Wilcoxon and Kruskal Wallis H tests. According to the result, it was concluded that there was a significant difference in favor of the experimental group in the attitude towards STEM education, basic skills and STEM career interest of posttest scores of the students.