Repurposing Simple Educational Robots for Secondary Schools

Abstract

Abstract This practice-oriented paper presents three classroom-ready mathematics activities that repurpose simple educational robots – Bee-Bot, Ozobot, and Dot – for older learners and pre-service teachers. Rather than arguing that simple robots are inherently better than more sophisticated tools, the paper shows how instructional design, task structure, and teacher orchestration shape the motivational value of robotics in mathematics lessons. The article is grounded in professional literature on motivation, educational robotics, and mathematics learning, and it interprets the activities through a concise design lens centred on autonomy, competence, relatedness, self-efficacy, and gameful challenge. For each activity, the paper describes the instructional purpose, materials, classroom flow, typical misconceptions, scaffolds, and adaptation options. The contribution is practical rather than empirical: the paper offers transferable design principles and implementation guidance for practitioners who wish to integrate educational robotics into mathematics instruction in ways that are cognitively demanding, motivationally supportive, and feasible in ordinary school settings.