Twenty-first-century society can be defined as a culturally connected society due to technology. It is logical that in the field of education, more and more studies are interested in the integration of STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) as a way of acquiring what have been called twenty-first-century competencies: collaboration, creativity, critical thinking, and communication (Hussein et al., 2019). In a world where technology is present in all aspects of everyday life, teaching must be updated and implement new forms of competency learning where students are not limited to memorizing content but can learn the concepts thanks to the application of new technologies (Barrera Lombana, 2015; Anwar et al., 2019; Sánchez-Tendero et al., 2019; Turan & Aydogdu, 2020). In this sense, one of the most critical challenges facing the educational community is precisely knowing how to integrate educational robotics (hereafter, ER) into the design of classroom activities (Nikolopoulou & Gialamas, 2015; Papadakis, 2020).
ER is an emerging field in education characterized by the use of robots as learning tools capable of linking the different areas of the school curriculum with action competence learning. ER is conceived not only as an end in itself but as a way of enabling problem-based learning, where students must collaborate to solve challenges; in this way, their cognitive and communicative skills are enhanced around the meaningful learning of curricular content.
Most studies are framed within the constructivist paradigm (Piaget, 1968), according to which learning is constructed through processes of conceptual assimilation and accommodation through problem-solving. This paper accepts the constructivist statement as a starting point. However, it also integrates the precepts of the cognitive paradigm in which language is understood as another cognitive faculty that interacts with the other cognitive processes (i.e., memory or attention) by establishing a vehicular relationship. The communicative utterances of children when solving problems are important elements in determining how knowledge is acquired (Bruner, 1984). Another relevant notion is the fact that learning must be meaningful and transferable. In order for students to integrate knowledge into cognitive frameworks, we must allow them to experience and apply such learning to contexts that replicate or assimilate as much as possible to problems of everyday reality. Only in this way will the acquisition of so-called learning and transfer skills be achieved (Anwar et al., 2019).
However, one of the current limitations to integrating ER in the classroom is the lack of teacher training on the didactic possibilities of robotics (Canfarotta & Casado-Muñoz, 2019; Gökçearslan et al., 2018; Uğur-Erdoğmuş, 2021). Without a sound theoretical background and a foundation on which to base the didactic implementation of ER, the cognitive and pedagogical benefits derived from the application of robotics as an educational tool (Angeli & Valanides, 2020; García-Valcárcel & Caballero-González, 2019; Sullivan & Bers, 2016) will not be transferred to students. It is, therefore, urgent that ER research offers models of applied learning to the school curriculum that teachers can understand and apply (Acosta, 2016). It is, therefore, necessary that the type of learning be determined based on both the type of learner (infant, primary, secondary, high school, university) and the robot used (Jung & Won, 2018).
One of the skills pointed out by studies in robotics is the ability to divide the challenge into smaller tasks, the so-called sequential thinking, which, in the field of language learning, finds its methodological correlate in the task-based approach (Long & Crookes, 1992). As stated Langacker (1987), the notion of profiling plays a fundamental role in this skill wherein the application in ER would explain the fact that, in order to solve the challenge posed, students must be able to select from among all the stimuli received, those that are informatively relevant. Thus, knowledge is acquired by inferring its procedural utility by bringing various interdisciplinary skills into play. This type of integrated learning must be developed from the early stages of education when the child establishes his or her cognitive process. One learning approach that has been successfully implemented with kindergarten students is Robotics Project-based Learning (Papadakis, 2020). This proposal includes the approach of knowledge from interdisciplinary areas in its didactic method. With regard to the Spanish curriculum, Sánchez-Tendero et al., (2019) evaluated the motivation and enjoyment of students in the third year of kindergarten, and their degree of assimilation of a learning process included in the curriculum of the “Knowledge and Interaction with the Environment” area, using the Bee-Bot and Blue-Bot robots. The results indicate that using robotics as a means of learning is both useful and motivating. The benefits of ER in teaching processes have also been found in inclusive education. Likewise, the study by Hamzad et al. (2014) focused on the teaching process of preschool children with autism. They concluded that, through the use of ER, students managed to better generalize learning by facing challenges appropriate to their level that reproduced contexts closer to their reality than when learning was solely presented by visual or auditory means. Furthermore, the systematic review supported by Tlili et al. (2020) analyzed the design, implementation, and outcome of robot-assisted in special education research through the perspective of activity theory. This research underlines the importance of designing didactic activities by selecting objectives and robots appropriate to the possibilities and needs of the students.
Our proposal is framed within the inclusive school paradigm advocated by Daniela and Lytras (2019), where ER is conceived “as a tool for knowledge construction and as an assistive tool for students who have problems in specific fields, or ER may be used to change students' attitudes to learning-class culture-allowing everyone to be accepted and involved” (p. 222). We defend that ER is a motivating learning medium for students, who activate all their competence and communicative strategies to overcome the challenge posed by the teacher. In our case, we present an activity design in which students need to apply their knowledge of the semantic relations corresponding to the second year of Infant Education of the Spanish school curriculum called “Languages: Communication and Representation.” This area includes the linguistic items corresponding to the development and acquisition of 4-year-old children. Our proposal focuses on the semantic component, specifically, the categorical relationships established between concepts. When learning the concepts within our daily environment, inclusive categories are established that organize knowledge according to their similarities, thus obtaining semantic fields. By organizing meanings into semantic fields or hyperonyms (“a lexical unit, an umbrella term, that includes within it, the meaning of other words”), cognitive processing is optimized, since the categories are grouped around a common semantic feature (“a minimal semantic feature, a distinctive component of meaning that differentiates one lexical unit from another”). This cognitive saving, called semantic priming, has been investigated in the area of linguistic development, where several neuroimaging studies on cognitive processing have shown that, when a hyperonym appears in a text, it directly preactivates the related concepts: the hyponyms (Kandahai & Federmeier, 2008; Takashima et al., 2019; Mathur et al., 2020; Luchkina & Waxman, 2021). This categorical relationship between concepts is developed and established in the oral language of children between three and four years of age (Mueller & Cramer, 2001; Tomasello, 2003), wherein the child interacts with his environment and learns the relationship between the representational elements of the world. Thus, in the case of the hyperonym “animal,” the child groups the concepts related to the semas “+alive,” “−human,” “−vegetable” and links the concepts of “cat, lion, elephant…,” which in this case would be the co-hyponyms (“hyponyms that refer to the same hypernym or superordinate term”).
The approach of this study is innovative in that it presents an applied proposal that uses ER as a means of linguistic curricular learning integrated into teaching practice and where not only are learning outcomes measured, but also the viability of the didactic design. In the context of Spain, we found few proposals applied in Early Childhood Education courses focused on the area of “Communication and Representation of Reality.” The proposal by Hidalgo and Pérez-Marín (2019), whose objective is based on learning to exchange turns of speech in students aged 3–5 years, stands out. However, the methodology and results are not aimed at verifying whether learning had been achieved but rather verify whether the students enjoyed participating and were engaged with the didactic experience.
This research aims to apply data directly derived from the application of educational robotics in the classroom. Our research focuses on the shortcomings identified by Toh et al. (2016), Jung & Won (2018), and Hussein (2019) regarding ER research. It provides actual data to answer the following questions: (1) what knowledge has implemented educational intervention mediated by the use of ER, (2) what didactic objectives related to the curriculum can be utilized in a crosscutting manner thanks to the use of ER, and (3) to which characteristics do the young children's learning processes respond?