Curriculum analysis and design, implementation, and validation of a STEAM project through educational robotics in primary education

Technological changes pose the need to redefine educational models, incorporating programs, and methodologies, so that students acquire the scientific‐technological competencies required in today's society. The objective of the research is aimed at establishing a generic method to develop STEAM projects, which are consistent with current curricula and at experimentally testing its validity by developing a STEAM project for a Primary Education class. As an example, and without loss of generality, the method proposed in this article is used to develop STEAM projects from the curriculum in the 4th, 5th, and 6th year of Primary Education in Spain. As a result, 11 areas of opportunity were detected, understood as areas that meet the necessary conditions to become the main theme of a STEAM project, and from which the “Sustainability” area was selected to develop a STEAM project. The project consists of an educational robotics kit, including a board that simulates a city and a robot programmed to travel on the board and activate the different elements that will make it a sustainable city. This first experience was carried out in a classroom with 30 students of 5th year, who showed great interest in the project and achieved a very satisfactory performance.