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Our Story

Our story began with a shared vision to make education more inclusive and inspiring through the power of robotics and collaboration.

Background

In an increasingly digital and diverse world, there is a growing need for educational models that integrate both technological skills and inclusive values from an early age. This project explores how hands-on interaction with self-built educational robots can enhance learning in primary education, particularly among 8- to 9-year-old children. By combining programming, problem-solving, and social collaboration, the initiative aims to foster both digital literacy and socio-emotional development. Supported by the Erasmus+ Programme and involving partners from six European countries, the project seeks to create an inclusive learning environment that prepares children for the challenges of the digital future.

Mission & Vision

Our project is driven by the mission to foster inclusive, engaging, and future-oriented learning experiences through the use of educational robotics. By empowering children to develop both digital and socio-emotional skills in a collaborative setting, we aim to build a strong foundation for lifelong learning and active participation in a digital society. Our vision is to become a leading model in primary education across Europe, where inclusion and innovation go hand in hand to prepare young learners for the challenges and opportunities of tomorrow.

Providing the Ability to Pursue Opportunities

The aim of the project is to investigate how interaction with educational robots can promote and support learning processes of technology, programming and socio-emotional skills in children. Our target group is 8- to 9-year-olds, in primary education, focusing on inclusive classes for all children.

The fusion of inclusion and digital skills are becoming key elements of our time in an increasingly digitalized world. We work closely with our European partners to make a significant contribution to inclusive education. Our focus is particularly on primary education, where we want to emphasize social participation, the strengthening of children’s self-concept and the promotion of IT and technical skills. In this way, we would like to help prepare young people for the challenges of an increasingly digitalised world. The idea of our project is to integrate self-built educational robots into social activities.

Our project aims to include self-built educational robots in social activities designed to promote social interaction and diversity in primary education, at the same time, encourage informatics and technology skills, mastering the digital transformation by developing digital and promoting interest and competence in science, technology and engineering.

As part of the robotics project, we teach the participating children to understand and apply simple principles of informatics and technology. Our intention is indeed for them to use their skills to solve real-life problems. Furthermore, we want to strengthen cooperation and show young people what potential they have.

The project is co-financed by the Erasmus + Programme of the European Union and it is implemented, between 3 years (01.01.2024 – 01.01.2027), being a Cooperation partnership in higher education (KA220-HED). It is a transnational consortium led by University of Duisburg-Essen (Germany), which includes partners from five others countries: University of Jyväskylä (Finland), Foyle Internship Europe Limited (Ireland), Vytautas Magnus University (Lithuania), M&M Profuture Training, S.L. (Spain) and Dumlupınar University (Turkey).

What Robots4inclusion implements

Choose your learning level

Training of teachers and trainers

Curriculum for training courses in the form of Open Educational Resources (OER) in the thematic areas

Social-emotional learning Socio-technical learning cohesive inclusion

Socio-technical and inclusive e-learning platform (OER with digitally integrated inclusive workshop)

Training on how to use and handle the inclusive educational robot developed.

Our Team

Devon Lane

Professor

Courtney Henry

Assistant Professor

Jane Cooper

Assistant Professor

Esther Howard

Visual Artist