EDUCATIONAL ROBOTICS, CHEMISTRY TEACHING AND COOPERATIVE LEARNING: A PROPOSAL FOR THE COURSE OF UNIVERSITY EDUCATION IN CIVIL ENGINEERING

Students, generally, are afraid of studying chemistry because they understand that it is a very complex area of knowledge and that it doesn’t has use in daily lives and in intended profession, which is a problem we identified in a Civil Engineering course. With this, we proposed a project in this course, based on educational robotics and educational cooperation, with the intention to form a group of students and a teacher to make a robot involving chemical knowledge in civil construction. The group made a robot, using an Arduino kit and material recycling, to identify electrochemical corrosion in concrete structures. We conducted a case study about the group through the analysis of gestures, products made, and notes in a notebook, from which two cooperative categories emerged: planning and application. From these categories, we identified that the students had their cognitive structures unbalanced by difficult situations, trials, errors, and diverse knowledge. The formation of a new equilibrium condition resulted from individual and social developments in constant interdependence, allowing the joint construction of knowledge, whose complexity increased during the process and culminated in the realization of the robot. All these aspects characterized cooperative learning.