Using Arduino in Service Learning to Engage Pre-service STEM Teachers into Collaborative Learning

摘要

Engineers must be able to collaborate with colleagues to successfully respond to the complex challenges in a contemporary workplace. The related training and research is limited, especially in curriculum design. Service learning integrates community service to provide students with field experiences, situating course concepts and objectives in the context of authentic situations and making links to their academic learning. In a teacher education program, service learning has the potential to help pre-service teachers realize the challenges that they are going to face, and aid them in becoming reflective practitioners. This issue is more challenging for STEM education, in which pre-service teachers are trained to teach students how to integrate Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics knowledge and build up real-world problem-solving skills. This study adopted Arduino as a technology tool for pre-service teachers to create teaching artifacts for elementary school technology education. The participants of this study were fourteen pre-service teachers. To examine the learning benefits, this study adopted diary methods, participant interviews, documents such as photos of making Arduino-supported artifacts, an intrinsic motivation inventory and reflection worksheets. The results showed participants had gained better understanding of STEM and positive attitude toward the collaborative service learning. Participants appreciated the opportunity in gaining different views of what they had learned in classrooms and how a STEM curriculum could be implemented in an elementary school. The results supported the proposed use of Arduino in service learning for pre-service teachers in teaching children STEM knowledge. This study hopes to broaden the spectrum of service learning, STEM education, and teacher education.