| Sumario: | Robotics education has received an increasing attention in recent years as a means to build students' motivation, team collaboration skills, and other valuable 21st century competencies. Yet there is a lack of experimental studies to investigate and identify strategies to facilitate robotics education. This study adopted a 2 × 2 quasi‐experimental design to investigate two strategies: the incorporation of augmented reality (AR) and the introduction of competition in robotics activities. Students' robotics task performance, team collaboration processes, 21st century learning competencies and learning motivation were measured as dependent variables. The results indicated that AR significantly improved students' motivation, team processes, and 21st century competencies. Moreover, the effects of AR were more pronounced with the competition groups. Implications are drawn to provide guidelines on the use of AR and competition in robotics education. Lay Description: What is currently known about the subject matter?Robots in education have been recognized as an effective approach to enhance learning competencies.The benefits of AR in learning gains and motivation. What their paper adds to this?To design robotics curricula that can be used in middle schools.To understand what middle school students can learn from the robotics curricula. The implications of study findings for practitionersHow to utilize AR in robotics education.What are the structure and pace of robotics curricula for middle school students?
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