We need to prepare students for jobs that don’t yet exist

In June a team of eight sixth-class children from Wicklow will travel to the UK city of Bath to represent Ireland against teams from 29 other countries in an international robotics competition. The team, which won the national Robotics First Lego League competition in January, designed, built and programmed an autonomous robot, made of Lego, and used it to demonstrate aspects of equine therapy.

Whether or not they win the competition, the 12-year-olds have already learned valuable lessons by participating, according to their principal Dara Mulhall of Wicklow Montessori primary school.

“They had to brain-storm to come up with the idea, using their imagination and creativity to design a robot which, they thought initially, would be able to do all sorts of mad things like jump fences. Then they got stuck into the engineering and maths side, through which they learned what they could actually get their robot to do in the real world. And throughout the whole project, which they have been working on all year, they had to work as a team, co-operate with and support one another.”

At heart the value of such initiatives is that it helps students develop what is called “computational thinking”, formulating a problem, working out a solution and then carrying it out. It’s a skill that is becoming more important than ever given the speed at which digital technology is breaking out from desk top PCs and into all aspects of our life, from fitness trackers to smart fridges.

Digital technologies

The value of the robotics activity engaged in at Wicklow Montessori primary school is familiar to Prof

Deirdre Butler

, senior lecturer in digital learning at the DCU Institute of Education. A former teacher deputy principal, much of her current work focuses on creative uses of digital technologies in the classroom. This includes the use of not just Lego but Minecraft, a popular online game in which gamers create and compete against their peers in landscapes they create themselves.

This helps develop such skills as design thinking, digital storytelling and games-based learning, enriching and enlivening the experience for students, creating learning environments suited to the 21st century.

“The skills we need to develop for the future are critical thinking, complex communications and creative problem-solving,” says Butler. “We have moved on from thinking of ourselves as the ‘information society’ because the Internet allowed us have access to all this information. Then we realised that information isn’t enough, knowledge is what is required, which is why we talk now about the ‘knowledge’ economy instead,” says Butler.

Consequently, the when it comes to tech in the classroom, the emphasis is on developing the skills that will enable students cope with, adapt to and see opportunity arising from new technologies as they emerge.

Growth mindset

“We need to prepare students for jobs that don’t yet exist and the way to do that is to foster a growth mindset.”

As such, simply providing children with high-tech classroom equipment such as whiteboards and iPads is not enough. "If you are using an iPad as a reader, then it's just a book. It's how you use the technology to enhance a class that counts," says Dr Yvonne Crotty, a lecturer in the school of education studies at DCU.

Crotty leads the EU Erasmus+ Play4Guidance (P4G) project, developing and implementing an online business game to guide and educate students in both entrepreneurial and mathematical skills.

In this, and in projects she works on which uses technology to inspire science education, the aim is to enhance the learning experience for students. With the entrepreneurship game, students set up a virtual business, source goods and sell them, and make choices along the way, for which they score points and compete against one another.

Here too the technology alone is not enough. “We’d get students to play a game at home on their own. They’d give up at some point and so, next day, we would deconstruct what happened,” says Crotty.

“What the technology did for them was bring up the issue of giving up, thinking you can’t do something, and showing them that to be successful you have to persevere. It’s just a game. It’s only when you reflect on it, and deconstruct it, that the learning comes. The technology does not do the thinking. It’s the reflecting piece that counts.”