COLLABORATIVE LEARNING IN STEM-DRIVEN COMPUTER SCIENCE EDUCATION: A ROBOT CONTEST-BASED APPROACH

Three research domains STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics), Collaborative Learning (CL) and Contest-Based Learning (CBL) further evolves extremely rapidly in their own rank as the urgent need to respond to the existing challenges of the 21st century. So far, however, it is yet little known about how these domains should or could be integrated more systematically aiming at extending and deepening the interdisciplinary knowledge building for the gifted or highly engaged learners. This paper provides a framework that supports a synergy of exploring these domains together in some systemized way. We have developed and implemented this framework by adapting a few known approaches in CL and integrating them with the attributes of STEM-driven Computer Science education and rules and guidelines of the internationally recognized robot contest, the First Lego League. We provide the model to implement this framework. We have used this framework during two years in the preparatory work for these contests, i.e. learning through complex tasks solving, and results of two contests evaluated by the external experts.