An Investigation of Vocational Students’ Attitude towards STEM Robotic Activities

Abstract

Engineering education is one of the most demanded topics in Thailand. With the traditional instruction, pre-service engineering teachers are not well promoted to learn actively. Based on this point of view, this study developed a series of active learning activities in corresponding to the Robotic based on STEM framework. This aims to help enhance students’ understanding on the robotics, functionality, and applications. This study documented perceptions of STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) content and careers for vocational students participating in STEM activities focused on industrial robotics. The analysis of the answers from 578 students in vocational education attended the activities and completed the questionnaires that showed the results showed that student’s attitude after the activities were compared across gender groups (men=421, female=157). The finding of this study is not only fruitful for students, especially pre-service engineering teachers, but also shed light of the revolutionized teaching activities for other teachers in different fields. Since this is a very first implementation of the proposed framework, it requires more investigations and improvements in the future.