Robotics and automation in upper secondary school
Image: Ritsumeikan Moriyama Junior and Senior High School
“Students work on their projects all by themselves with minimal instructions from teachers. I did not know they had such potential in being active and creative.”
Hisayasu Ito, Chief of Media Education
Super Science High School
Ritsumeikan Moriyama Junior and Senior High School in Moriyama is a unique school in Shiga prefecture with internationalisation being at the heart of its learning strategy.
The school has been designated as a Super Science High School (SSH) by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology of Japan.
The school offers Teachease modules in robotics and automation in secondary school.
In addition to the Teachease service, high school students from Ritsumeikan also come to Finland for our annual Future Skills Camp held in Oulu where they team up with Finnish students and work together on entrepreneurial coding projects.
Teaching automation in an applied process
The school offers Teachease modules in secondary school to teach coding and automation.
Mr Ito, the teacher leading the implementation process, stated in an interview that students enjoyed the creative work and it was matched by the learning outcomes, ‘In hands-on project work, that is where the students use their creativity and work with physical objects, the learning speed was surprisingly fast. The students started developing their project by themselves watching the videos and reading instructions in the book. I didn’t know that the students had such a potential in being active and creative.’
‘Making alarms is an excellent idea when learning programming. Our students were extremely motivated. One simple coding project included all the important programming concepts. It is only a matter of how far and deep students want to go.’
Student perspective
Over 90% of students at Ritsumeikan consider Teachease modules interesting and fun with the project work being by far the most popular part of the learning process (according to 80% of the surveyed students).
‘The difficulty level of our materials was just right. The content was challenging at times but we helped each other and solved the problems together,’ stated a seventh grade student
