Robotics to the cube…
or rather, to the “CUBETTO”
“The idea of creating an educational robotics course in kindergarten has excited us from the very beginning, and we are confident that the project can grow over the years. We decided to develop it together with teacher Monica Greco from the ‘Galvani’ kindergarten, with whom we have already had the opportunity to collaborate in recent years.
The school hosts six age-homogeneous sections (two for three-year-olds, two for four-year-olds, and two for five-year-olds, serving over 150 children), with a highly diverse student body in terms of background and nationality. Within the Comprehensive Institute (Istituto Comprensivo), educational and instructional intervention across all school levels—starting right from kindergarten—aims to offer a pathway that provides every child, regardless of spoken language or cultural background, with equal opportunities for growth. This is designed to respect today’s globalized context, which, now more than ever, reflects the citizenship of us all.
For this reason, in a society that continues to evolve in both its structure and organizational dynamics, we believe it is essential to educate children toward developing competencies that will enable them to find their own place, even in such an unpredictable future.
GENERAL OBJECTIVES
Educational Robotics enables children to:
- greater learning effectiveness through a hands-on ‘learning by doing’ approach
- to develop computational thinking and a strong aptitude for problem-solving, critical analysis,
and resolution - to develop digital competence, one of the eight European key competences for lifelong learning
Cubetto by Primo Toys is the tool we have chosen to use, as it offers great educational opportunities: it is a highly versatile robot that lends itself to multiple learning scenarios (motor, logical, mathematical, scientific, and linguistic).
With this tool, teachers can foster traditional curricular learning goals—essential for achieving the early childhood education competence standards—through an innovative workshop approach. This methodology enables the development of key cross-curricular objectives, such as collaborative learning and computational thinking.
Cubetto consists of a control board and instruction blocks, which make programming a hands-on experience. By playing with Cubetto, children learn to think like programmers, as each block has a specific shape representing a specific instruction. Together, they form a tactile, playful procedural programming language.
Computational thinking lies at the heart of coding. It allows us to analyze a problem by breaking it down into the sequence of steps required to solve it—a valuable perspective for everyday life, not just for programming.
By programming Cubetto, children internalize core programming concepts and actions—such as command queues, algorithms, debugging, and functions—all while enjoying a play-based experience focused on these fundamentals.
GOALS & OBJECTIVES
- To lay the foundations for a proper development of computational thinking
- To motivate and stimulate children through a hands-on learning approach
- To develop problem-solving skills and the ability to manage challenging situations
- To create teamwork and collaborative learning opportunities
- To foster independent and self-directed learning
- To develop spatial awareness and orientation skills
- To work on cause-and-effect relationships
TEACHING APPROACH
These objectives are achieved through:
- by promoting engaging and playful learning activities using structured pathways for Cubetto
- by designing obstacle courses and worksheets that replicate Cubetto’s spatial movements
- by fostering turn-taking and teaching children to respect waiting times
- by encouraging hypothesis formation and critical thinking
- by creating story-driven pathways aimed at developing sequencing, classification, language, numeracy, and logical skills
