A Visualized Exploration of Educational Robotics Over Five Decades

• Published in: International journal of technology and human interaction Vol. 20; no. 1; pp. 1 - 21
• Main Authors: Xu, Wei, Dou, Anqi, Feng, Yu
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Hershey IGI Global 01.01.2024
• Subjects: Citation analysis; Clustering; Education; Educational objectives; Effectiveness; Qualitative analysis; Robot learning; Robotics; Skills
• ISSN: 1548-3908; 1548-3916
• DOI: 10.4018/IJTHI.356662

With the swift development of information technologies, educational robotics has been widely used in education, generally leading to improved educational outcomes. While educational robotics has gained popularity and achieved success in education, few researchers have conducted bibliographic analyses in this field. This study complements this missing link by visualizing the top ten authors, organizations, countries, keywords, authors, and sources via VOSviewer. The clustering techniques in CitNetExplorer were used to cluster the publications, where citation networks and qualitative analyses were developed to discuss the topics including the learning outcomes, social and interactive skills, working memory, and higher-order skills in the educational robotics-based context. This study concludes that effective educational robotics can exert a positive influence on the learning outcomes and robotics can improve the development of proximal zones in human brains, conducive to the learning outcomes. Future researchers may focus their attention on robotic competitions, affective features, and evaluative and analytical frameworks to improve educational robotics-based educational effectiveness.