Computational thinking to enhance educational robotics in secondary school's curriculum

Synthesis: Valls i Pou (2026) examines how computational thinking can enhance the effective integration of educational robotics into secondary school curricula. Arguing that educational robotics is a strong resource for fostering problem solving, critical thinking, and STEAM subjects, the paper relates the theoretical framework of computational thinking to 21st-century skills and secondary-school curriculum knowledge linked to STEAM. Through a literature analysis, it connects computational-thinking concepts and skills with curricular content, and proposes a concrete approach for linking computational-thinking concepts from the theoretical framework into official secondary curricula to guide robotics education.

Key Findings

• Educational robotics enhances problem solving, critical thinking, and STEAM promotion — but requires explicit development of computational-thinking concepts during student training.
• 21st-century skills are an accepted part of students' educational development and should be integrated with computational thinking and robotics activities.
• A literature analysis relates computational-thinking concepts and skills to the secondary-school curriculum, showing how the theoretical framework maps onto STEAM subject knowledge.
• The paper proposes linking computational-thinking theoretical concepts into the official secondary curriculum as a guide for applying educational robotics effectively.

Study Design & Method

This is a conceptual/literature-analysis paper (not an empirical study). It reviews the theoretical framework of computational thinking, relates its concepts and skills to 21st-century skills and STEAM subjects in the secondary-school curriculum, and develops a proposal for embedding computational-thinking concepts into official curricula to guide educational robotics practice. It draws on educational robotics and computational-thinking literature to establish the conceptual links.

What this means for practice

• Curriculum designers. Map computational thinking explicitly onto the official curriculum: relate Brennan and Resnick's concepts, practices, and perspectives to the Digital Field's dimensions and competencies.
• Curriculum designers. Use the paper's curricular adaptation table to assess one aspect at a time — CT knowledge, practice, or perspective, or a specific competency — while still reporting against official curriculum content.
• Educators. Make computational thinking concepts explicit in robotics activities so that robots serve genuine learning goals rather than isolated technical exercises.
• Educators. Embed robotics and CT activities in project-based learning, which the paper recommends as a basic methodology for the STEM/STEAM environment.
• Assessment designers. Extend the adaptation proposal with a rubric that defines degrees of acquisition for every item, since the worked example does not evaluate all items or weight them equally.

Limitations

• As a conceptual and literature-based paper, it presents a proposal rather than empirical evidence of learning outcomes; the proposed curriculum integration is not yet validated in practice.
• The focus is on the secondary-school context and STEAM subjects, so generalizability to other levels and disciplines is limited.

Citation

Valls i Pou, A. (2026). Computational thinking to enhance educational robotics in secondary school's curriculum. Proceedings of the 5th IEEE International Conference (GRETEL, La Salle Campus Barcelona, Ramon Llull University); the linked copy is the OSF preprint of the same paper.