Enhancing Students' Critical Thinking and Creative Thinking: An Integrated Mind Mapping and Robot-Based Learning Approach

Fostering students' critical thinking and creative thinking is an important aim in education. For example, art courses not only focus on artwork creation, but also on theoretical knowledge for identifying artworks. In the conventional lecture-based instruction mode for theoretical knowledge delivery, students' learning outcomes could be affected owing to the lack of student-teacher interactions, and hence researchers have started to employ interactive learning technologies, such as robots, to cope with this problem. However, without proper guidance and support, students' learning outcomes in such an interactive learning mode could be limited. To improve students' learning effectiveness, this study proposed a mind mapping-assisted robot (MM-R) approach for an art course. A quasi-experimental design was adopted to explore the effects of the proposed learning approach on students' performance in art appreciation, digital painting creation, creative thinking tendency, and critical thinking awareness. A total of 48 students from two classes in a university in central Taiwan were recruited to participate in this study. One class was the experimental group (n = 25) adopting the MM-R approach, while the other class was the control group (n = 23) adopting the conventional robot (C-R) approach. The results indicated that the integration of the MM-R approach improved students' learning achievement, performance in digital painting creation, creative thinking tendency, and critical thinking awareness.