(1) Background: Info-communication technology (ICT) offers opportunities for innovations in teaching and learning methods, bringing significant changes in the world of pedagogy. The field called educational robotics is both a motivational basis for teaching and learning coding and programming, and a tool for linking STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) fields. Moreover, it might contribute to the development of cognitive and social skills. The aim of the present paper is to report on a pilot study at the intersection of neurodiversity and educational robotics. (2) Methods: The pilot study was part of a larger project, namely Robotics for the Inclusive Development of Atypical and Typical Children (RIDE). A pre-test/post-test design was used to examine the development of different cognitive processes in sixth-grade students, such as computational thinking (CT), spatial relations, visuo-constructive ability, attention, and reading ability, in relation to a robotics development program employed in the classroom. (3) Results: The results suggest a general improvement on nearly all measures. Specifically, participants’ performance improved significantly from pre-test to post-test in the visuo-constructive abilities test, they made significantly fewer reading errors, and improved substantially in their reading comprehension. (4) Conclusions: The RIDE project’s curriculum development has resulted in a highly innovative, sustainable, and inclusive package of pedagogical methods, and the pilot research shows promising results regarding the implementation of robotics in education.

Recently, event-based prospective memory (PM) performance of children has been shown to benefit from different encoding strategies such as imagining the execution of a future PM task (i.e., future thinking) and making performance predictions (i.e., metacognitive monitoring). This study aimed to investigate whether and how these two encoding strategies affect PM performance alone and in combination. For this purpose, 127 children aged 8-11 years were assigned to four encoding conditions: (a) standard, (b) performance predictions, (c) future thinking, and (d) future thinking + performance predictions. The ongoing task performance costs (i.e., attentional monitoring), working memory (WM) span, and metacognitive monitoring judgments, such as task difficulty expectations, performance postdictions, confidence judgments, and strategy use, were also evaluated among participants. The results show that combining future thinking instructions with performance predictions considerably improved children's PM performance without incurring additional attentional monitoring costs. Moreover, whereas children generally tended to overestimate their PM performance, more realistic lower-performance predictions were related to higher PM scores for children in the combined condition. Finally, age, WM, and strategy use significantly predicted PM performance independent of the encoding condition. This study is the first to demonstrate that combining future thinking instructions with performance predictions enhances children's PM performance compared with each encoding strategy alone. Moreover, this work is the first to show that by simply imagining the execution of a PM task, children's prediction accuracy can be improved, which is significantly related to the PM performance advantage.

This study investigated developmental differences in metacognitive monitoring and control in younger (5- to 6-year-old) and older (8- to 10-year-old) children’s prospective memory (PM). Metacognitive monitoring was assessed by asking the children to judge their performance before (prediction) and after (postdiction) performing a resource-demanding event-based PM task. Metacognitive control was evaluated by comparison of ongoing task (OT) performance without and with the embedded PM task (i.e., attentional monitoring costs). Older children outperformed younger children in the PM task and were also more accurate in judging their PM performance than younger children, who greatly overestimated their PM performance. Attentional monitoring costs were found only in older children and were associated with both PM performance and performance predictions, thus suggesting that only older children were able to translate metacognitive monitoring into effective control. This study reports new findings on the relation between metacognition and PM during childhood.