The objective of robotics competitions, such as FIRST LEGO® League (FLL®), is to create a tournament that promotes high-level engineering and academic engagement in students by providing the most rewarding experience possible for the largest group of students. To increase the number of students age 9-14 successfully participating in FLL® from public schools, and to concurrently increase the diversity of the pool of student participants, the Georgia FLL® organizers have implemented a number of interventions. These interventions can be grouped into A) Centralized policy decisions that impact how the program is run at the state level; B) Outreach activities that provide low-income teams with training and supplies; C) Promotion of LEGO® Mindstorm use within the actual school curriculum; and D) Partnerships with school systems to promote after-school FLL® robotics clubs. This chapter reviews these efforts and their effect on tournament diversity.
There is substantial concern, both at the state and national level, that student interest in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields is not adequate to meet the future competitive needs of the United States (National Academy of Sciences, 2010; Augustine, 2007). As a result, different strategies need to be implemented and evaluated to determine their effectiveness in fostering the type of student success that will help sustain an early interest in the STEM disciplines. Many studies have shown, at least anecdotally, that robotics activities and competitions such as FIRST LEGO® League (FLL®) can successfully promote K-12 student engagement in, and mastery of, engineering skills and habits of mind (Barker & Ansorge, 2007; Berger, Jones & Knott, 2005; Brown et al., 2006; Klenk, Ybarra & Dalton, 2004; Melchior, Cohen, Cutter & Leavitt, 2005; Ohland, 2006; Petre & Price, 2004; Sloan-Schroeder & Ingman, 2005; Wang, LaCombe & Rogers, 2004; Weinberg, Pettibone, Thomas, Stephen & Stein, 2007; Williams, Ma, Prejean, & Ford, 2007). Generally the benefits of these types of activities are limited primarily to students who self-select into after-school robotics clubs or summer programs or who live in neighborhoods where parents have the time, resources and knowledge to successfully coordinate and coach a FLL® team. Without intervention, these common pathways to participation too often rule out active involvement by low-income students in many predominantly minority schools. These students are the ones most in need of experiences such as FLL® to help them maintain their engagement in STEM and counter the low achievement reported on national assessments (NAEP Report, 2009).
Typically, in FLL® competitions the majority of teams that emerge successful from the qualifying tournaments are independent (home-school or neighborhood) teams, and virtually all of the state-level awards go to those types of teams, rather than to teams originating in public schools. This chapter details efforts taken by the authors, as part of Georgia Tech’s Center for Education Integrating Science, Mathematics and Computing (CEISMC) and the primary Georgia FIRST LEGO® League organizers, to increase the diversity of the FLL® tournament by increasing the number of under-represented minority children from public schools who successfully participate in the event.
The FLL® competition is frequently promoted as an effective method of introducing middle school children to engineering problem solving and of increasing the pipeline of students into engineering and other STEM disciplines. The FLL® program centers on a Challenge that is released by the national FIRST organization annually in early September. Participating students in grades 4-8 (ages 9-14) tackle a problem with a socially relevant theme that is designed to increase the students’ awareness of current affairs. Each student team can have up to ten students and is required to build a robot using the LEGO® Mindstorm robot set and program it to perform 8-10 tasks that relate to the overarching theme. Teams are also required to research the theme and develop a product or strategy to address the social issue.
FLL® tournaments, generally held in late November through January, consist of a 3-round robot competition, presentation and judging of the research projects, judging of the technical and creative merits of the robot designs, and an analysis of the quality of the teamwork and cooperation between team members. During each round of the robot competition every team competes head-to-head against another team, attempting to complete as many tasks as possible in 2.5 minutes. The robots must begin at a home base and may only be manipulated when the robot returns to base. During the robot’s autonomous navigation of the challenge field, teams earn points for each task the robot completes. All teams have a minimum of three chances to run their robot during each tournament. In the last four years, FLL® has addressed issues such as: Biomedical engineering (2010); Smart roads and traffic engineering (2009); Climate connections (2008); and Alternative power sources and use of resources (2007).
The State of Georgia has a highly successful state FLL® tournament series that has grown in size from 48 teams in 2004 to 297 teams in 2010, and it currently serves approximately 2,000 students annually (Figure 1). In 2010 the Georgia FLL® tournament series consisted of twelve first-round qualifier competitions held on two Saturdays in late fall, three second-round super-qualifier competitions held in early January, and a single State-level competition in late January. With this level of growth come a number of challenges, including the need to maintain a consistent and rewarding experience for the students to continue their enthusiasm towards STEM learning.
| Figure 1. Georgia Participation in FLL® |
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In Georgia, girls and under-represented minorities (African American and Hispanic students) consistently make up between 22% and 30% of the student participants in Round 1 (Figure 2). Though the percent of participants who are girls remains fairly constant through Round 2 and the State competition, the representation by minority students drops substantially in the later rounds. A closer analysis of data collected during FLL® registration suggests that this drop is directly traceable to where the teams are located, how many hours they can dedicate to the task, and the experience level of the coach and student team members. Any effort to increase the success of the minority students within FLL® must therefore take into account the structural differences in how different teams are organized and how they engage in the experience.
| Figure 2. Minority and Female Participation in FLL® Competition |
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Variability in the FIRST LEGO® League Team Experience
We have found that under-represented minority students tend to experience FLL® under somewhat different circumstances than non-minority (Caucasian and Asian) students (Usselman, Davis & Rosen, 2008). For example, minority students are more likely than non-minority students to be involved in FLL® through a public school, rather than a private school, home school, or independent (non-school-affiliated) team (Figure 3). In addition, though the majority of the FLL teams overall (74% in 2006) participate in FLL® through extracurricular clubs rather than within normal school day classes, under-represented minority students are more likely than non-minority students to participate in FLL® within the school day curriculum rather than in an extracurricular club (38% vs. 24% in 2006). This presents a challenge for the teacher/coach as FLL® in the classroom is subject to normal school day constraints of time and standards-based learning, rather than having the flexibility and lack of defined standards typical of extracurricular clubs and teams.
| Figure 3. Where Students Participated in FLL®. Under-represented Minorities vs. Non-minorities (2006) |
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FLL® teams located within regular schools, even when conducted as an extracurricular activity, are at a distinct disadvantage in many ways when competing against home school and independent teams. School teams, both public and private, generally meet one day per week outside of the school day, often for less than 2 hours, whereas home school and independent teams can dedicate many hours per week to the activity. In addition, school teams tend to have more frequent turnover of students and coaches than non-school teams, and they are more inclusive about which students they allow to participate. These differences give home school and independent teams a large competitive advantage in the tournament over their school-based peers.
It is common knowledge in FLL® circles that home school and independent teams are hugely over-represented among the top scoring teams. This general observation was exemplified over a two year period in Georgia (2006 and 2007), when 15 of the top 20 awards given at the state competition went to non-school based teams, even though 80% of the 335 teams that first registered with FLL® that year were based at schools (Usselman, Davis & Rosen, 2008). In 2006, not a single minority student in Georgia was part of a non-school based team (Figure 3), so it is not surprising that minority students were not well-represented in the top tier of teams or even in the state tournament. The vast majority of minority students were eliminated in the first-round qualifier competition, giving them few opportunities to actually compete against another team and learn from the experience. When the competition is particularly skewed, and low-income minority public school teams are pitted from the start against highly coached suburban neighborhood teams, the whole experience runs the risk of being a very discouraging experience for students on the minority teams.
The objective of FIRST LEGO® League is to create a competition tournament that promotes high-level engineering and academic engagement in students by providing the most rewarding experience possible for the largest group of students. To increase the number of students successfully participating in FLL® from public schools and to concurrently increase the diversity of the pool of student participants, we have implemented a number of programs and policy changes. These programs and changes can be grouped into A) Centralized policy decisions that impact how the program is run at the state level; B) Outreach activities that provide low-income teams with training and supplies; C) Promotion of LEGO® Mindstorm use within the actual school curriculum; and D) Partnerships with school systems to promote after-school FLL® robotics clubs. The results of these initiatives can be seen in Figure 2, which shows a notable increase in participation by minorities in the later rounds in 2009 and 2010 as compared to 2008. This chapter will detail the interventions that have led to this increase.
INTERVENTIONS THAT PROMOTE DIVERSITY IN FLL®
Centralized Policy Decisions
Centralized policy decisions are made to manage growth and maintain a successful experience for the student participants. As a means of managing growth and enabling us to keep the Georgia State Tournament final competition at 48 teams, we implemented a first-level qualifying tournament in 2005, and a second-level (or “Super”) qualifier in 2007. In 2008, to help promote a positive experience for all students, we piloted a system that calculates a “Power Rating” for each team and structures the tournament series to promote, as much as possible, early round competitions between teams from similar backgrounds. We call this our “NCAA Basketball Tournament” model of tournament design—teams compete against similar teams during the early rounds (in the NCAA, this is during the regular season, here it is during the first-level and second-level qualifiers), and then the best come together for the final tournament. The expectation is that teams from the power conferences (in this case, non-school-based teams) will ultimately wind up winning the top awards at the state level. Novice teams, however, have a chance to observe other teams’ solutions to program challenges, redesign their own robots, hone their skills by participating in multiple rounds of competition, taste success in those early rounds against similar opponents, and have the thrill of going to the state competition. Being blown away by highly experienced opponents at the beginning of the tournament effectively limits the ability of these novice teams to practice, learn, and excel.
FLL® Power Rating Scores
For the 2008 FLL® season, we piloted a Power Rating score for the first time. This rating took into account:
In 2009 we modified this score to also include a rating for the type of team—primarily school-based vs. non-school based. Teams organized by non-profit youth or community organizations, such as the 100 Black Men or the Girl Scouts, were assigned the same rating as school-based teams, rather than independent teams.
The Power Ratings are calculated using the following values. Points are assigned based on input from the coach during the registration process, and “prior experience” refers to how the team performed the preceding year. Because of our view that some factors are particularly important predictors of tournament success, such as the amount of time available for the team to practice and the number of returning team members, the numerical scales are not always continuous.
Prior Experience of Sponsoring Organization
(Points)
Prior Experience of Coach
Students
Hours Spent on FLL® per Week
Type of Team
The power rating of the teams can range from a score of zero, for a brand new public school team with no experience and one 90 minute meeting during or after school per week, to a score of 20 for an experienced home school or independent team that is returning after having won a performance award the previous year and plans to dedicate more than six hours per week to FLL®.
Power Ratings by Type of Team and Percent Minority
Figure 4 shows the average power ratings of different types of teams in 2010. Youth organization-based teams had the lowest power ratings, and independent teams (which included home school teams) had the highest. Teams with the highest percent minority representation had the lowest power rating (Figure 5). These data held true for 2009 teams as well.
| Figure 4. 2010 Power Rating by Team Classification |
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| Figure 5. 2010 Average Power Ratings with respect to Minority Participation |
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Use of Power Rating to Assign Teams to Qualifying Competitions
The basic reason to assign power ratings was to give an objective score to teams to help group them appropriately during the tournament series. The first-round qualifier competitions in Georgia were coordinated by volunteers, generally school system personnel or experienced FLL® coaches. Nine of the twelve first-round 2010 competitions were in the metro-Atlanta area, where the bulk of the teams were located. The other three were distributed geographically around the state. Four of the nine metro-Atlanta competitions were coordinated by school systems, and five were coordinated by other volunteers.
During the registration process, Georgia FLL® teams were asked to give their first six choices for which competition they would like to attend. We then used a set of rules to assign teams by hand to competitions. These rules were:
This process of assigning teams requires thought and attention and can be quite labor intensive. However if that attention is not given, it is much more likely that mismatched teams will end up in a tournament, and strong, independent teams will end up winning most honors in an otherwise low-power competition. To avoid any controversies, we inform coaches about the process ahead of time. We have received very few complaints about the system, even from “powerful” teams who are required to travel some distance to participate in a tournament of similar teams rather than competing in a weaker qualifying tournament held in their local area.
Results of Power Rating System
Figure 6 shows the average Power Ratings for Round 1, Round 2 and the State Competition for 2009 and 2010. Table 1 shows the percentage of teams in each power rating range that progressed to the different rounds of the tournament in 2010.
| Figure 6. Average Power Ratings with respect to Level of Competition |
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Table 1. Power rating range of teams
| Team Power Rating | # in Round 1 | % advanced to Round 2 | % advanced to State |
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| 0-5 | 132 | 30% | 8% |
| 6-10 | 95 | 43% | 19% |
| 11-20 | 37 | 73% | 43% |
Clearly, the Power Rating is a fairly accurate general predictor of whether a team will progress to further rounds of the FLL® tournament.
One of the goals of implementing the power rating scale and assigning teams to qualifying competitions based partially on their power rating was to increase the number of minority students who progressed to a second round. The twelve 2010 Round 1 qualifying competitions ranged in average power rating from 4.3, for a 60% minority inner city competition, to 9.2 for a competition reserved for home school and independent teams, which included only 6% minority students. Each competition sent a proportional number of teams to the Round 2 super-qualifying competition. In 2007, before the implementation of the super-regional round, only 16% of minority students competed in a second tournament. In 2008, when we first piloted the power rating scale and began having a 2nd round of super-qualifiers, 22% of minorities progressed to a second round. By 2010, with the full implementation of the power rating system, 37% of minority students were able to compete in a second round, providing them both with a chance to develop their skills and a much more satisfying tournament experience (Rosen, Newsome & Usselman, 2011).
Outreach Activities
We have been working with 100 Black Men of Atlanta and Boeing to encourage participation by low-income minority teams. These teams are often late in registering for the competition, spend few hours per week on the activity, and are more likely than other teams to end up not successfully participating in the competition. This outreach initiative provides coaches with training on how to successfully organize and run a team, financial assistance to defer the costs of robotic kits and tournament registration fees, and training early in the fall for both coaches and students on how to build and program a LEGO® Mindstorm robot. At the fall training event students also have a chance to brainstorm about possible solutions to the specific FLL® challenge for that year’s competition, helping to hook them into the activity and giving them momentum to continue.
The fall training event for students and teachers also serves as an outreach activity for local high school robotics teams. The FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC®) for high school students strongly encourages teams to mentor younger students and rewards these activities during the FIRST competition. Atlanta-area FRC® team members familiarize themselves with the FLL® competition, and they lead building sessions for the younger students using materials that we have validated ahead of time.
After a brief welcome and introduction to the event, students and coaches participate in four one-hour sessions. To accommodate large numbers of students, these four sessions are run concurrently and repeated four times. Students, grouped with their team, circulate through the sessions over the course of the day. The four sessions are:
The day concludes with a 1.5 hour mentored robot-build time where teams are given the chance to start work on their FLL® robot. During this time coaches meet with FLL® organizers and discuss tips on how to successfully manage a team.
Of the twenty teams that have participated in the Boeing and 100 Black Men of Atlanta-sponsored program over a two year period (2009-2010), eight (40%) have progressed beyond the first round of the Georgia FLL® tournament. In 2010, one team, whose students are 95% under-represented minorities and 81% low income, even advanced to the state tournament. The school principal reported later that the students returned from the state tournament somewhat chagrined at their own efforts, but with a much better understanding of the level of achievement possible in FLL® and a strong determination that next year their team would be much more competitive on the state level. After participating in FLL® through this funded outreach initiative, a number of schools also have increased the number of teams participating from their school, funded through local sources.
Summer Camps
Another pathway for encouraging more students to participate in robotics competitions has been through summer camp offerings, held either at the university, or at individual middle or high schools. An example of the latter is the program offered since 2004 by a highly diverse, suburban Metro-Atlanta middle school. Through a combination of low fees and heavy promotion throughout the school system, the camp has steadily increased its enrollment of rising 5th and 6th graders over the past seven years. Fees are kept low to encourage participation by all students, and teachers are also encouraged to recommend deserving students for scholarships to the camp. Over 60 elementary schools in the district were represented during the summer of 2010, with slightly over 10% of the students attending for no cost. Enrollment has grown from 31 in 2004 to 256 in 2010.
Camp sessions are offered for one week in either the morning or afternoon. A half-day session works well to maintain a high level of student interest during the summer months and also allows students to participate in an engaging program while still enjoying their summer break. Most students learn about the program through word of mouth, or from their classroom teacher. Each session offers a competition similar to a FIRST LEGO® League game challenge and students are taught the building and programming skills needed for the competition. Each challenge offers multiple levels of scoring so that all students, novice through advanced, can experience some degree of success. Students either team up with friends or form teams from new acquaintances.
From the beginning, a high percentage of the students who registered for the camp (45% in Year 1) were girls. The relaxed atmosphere and the use of middle school students, many of them former campers and predominantly female, as volunteers creates a non-threatening environment that allows the elementary school girls to assert their ideas in an arena that is typically thought to be dominated by boys. In fact, teams that are exclusively male have only won a handful of the session challenges over the years. This same low-key mindset appears to encourage many campers to reach out and form alliances with children from other schools and backgrounds. One summer, every team was either mixed gender or mixed ethnicity.
Raising awareness of robotics, and specifically FIRST LEGO® League, among the students is only part of the goal of this summer camp program. It is also used as a method to train teachers to use LEGO® Mindstorm robots, and to provide robot kits to the various elementary and middle schools and promote FLL® in those schools. Each summer several teachers are invited to spend a week working with students at the camp. Priority is given to schools that represent underserved populations of students. The teachers experience firsthand the excitement that accompanies students working with robots in a competitive environment. Following the summer sessions, the teachers are given the Mindstorms kits that were used during camp. In this fashion, schools and teachers without sufficient funding to start teams at their schools are able to reduce the initial cost of starting a team. As an additional benefit, many of these teachers begin to incorporate the robotic activities and the FLL® competition into their classroom instruction. Since 2004, over 60 LEGO® Mindstorms kits have been distributed to deserving teachers throughout the school system.
Curricular Integration
Students traditionally under-represented in robotics are not as likely as Caucasian and Asian males to self-select into an after-school robotics club. One tactic to attract girls and under-represented minority students into FLL® is to incorporate the competition or related activities into the actual classroom curriculum. One example is a Georgia middle school teacher who successfully taught 8th grade mathematics using LEGO® Mindstorm kits. He addressed the mathematics concept of one-step, single variable equations using gear ratios and the distance/rate/time relationship, and students learned about and created scatterplots that showed how often a robot ended up in a defined location. However these types of initiatives are not commonly tried in core science and mathematics classrooms.
Instead, curricular integration is most easily done through the non-core “Exploratory” or “Connections” classes like Engineering Technology and Computer Applications, which are less likely than core science and mathematics classes to have restrictive educational content standards tied to standardized tests and school academic goals. In Georgia the majority of students who experience robotics and FLL® within the school-day curriculum do so within these non-core classes.
When robotics are presented within the school-day curriculum, girls and minorities are more likely to engage in the activities and become interested in a topic that they previously considered to be inappropriate or uninteresting. Girls, in particular, often have an “I can do that!” ah-ha moment when they realize that they can be as successful in the activity as their male peers, and that they enjoy the hands-on nature of the activity. This increases the likelihood that they will then self-select into a robotics competition activity like FLL® and that they will also encourage other girls to enroll in the courses. As an example, a metro-Atlanta middle school that implemented an “Applied Concepts of Engineering and Science” (ACES) elective course that utilized LEGO® robotics saw the number of girls in the course increase from 84 in Year 1 (46% of the participants) to 142 in Year 3 (54% of the participants) (Stillwell & Rosen, 2009). This increase was driven primarily by word of mouth and student requests, not by teacher referrals into the course.
Within the ACES classroom, students used LEGO® robots to investigate specific science and mathematics concepts connected to the appropriate grade-level state standards. Earth science students explored terrestrial navigation, life science students simulated cellular processes or animal motion, and physical science students examined aspects of force and motion through robotic hill climbs and wrestling matches. While the robots were the tools utilized to create the introductory engineering design experience, students would often want to move into the more complex aspects of engineering design required by middle school engineering competitions such as FLL®, the Future City competition, or BEST Robotics.
Because ACES was an elective technology course, students could direct their projects towards their specific interests. For example, at the end of their sixth grade year a small group of girls decided that they were more interested in space than in robots. They recognized that the robot experience was still valuable to all students, but they wanted something more. The instructor, therefore, challenged them to develop an interactive laboratory experience connecting robots and the lunar surface. At the beginning of the following school year, the girls had the opportunity to meet with Apollo 14 Lunar Module Pilot Edgar Mitchell. After talking to the astronaut about his mission experiences, the team decided to create a lunar simulation lab that could be used not only by ACES earth science students but also by elementary students in the attendance cluster. The result was a student-constructed small-scale lunar surface that enabled the LEGO® robots to maneuver among craters and ridges.
Another group of students took a Future City challenge far beyond a simple competition. The 2008-2009 mission was to create a sustainable city. This group designed a city in orbit around Jupiter. The city’s elliptical orbit allowed it to pass through the Io Plasma Torus to recharge the energy grid. As they were researching this challenge, the students discovered the Radio JOVE project and constructed a radio telescope on campus. The class could now make observations of the radio emissions from Jupiter and the Sun. A visiting NASA educational specialist suggested that the school become involved in the Goldstone Apple Valley Radio Telescope (GAVRT) program where the students were given access to a 34-meter dish at NASA’s Deep Space Network in the Mojave Desert. As a result of their participation, these students were invited to attend the launch of NASA’s JUNO Mission, a six-year expedition to Jupiter.
Clearly the specific content covered in elective technology courses and the pedagogical strategies utilized by the teacher are crucial to encouraging under-represented students to voluntarily participate. However, the ACES course provides good evidence that previously reluctant students will participate given an introduction to the materials through a course curriculum and the right encouragement.
Robotics in Core Science Classrooms
LEGO® robotics can also be incorporated into core science and mathematics classes, but it takes planning and careful assessment to ensure that the students master the specific content knowledge specified in the learning standards and do not just “play with robots”. The new Framework for K-12 Science Education, developed by the National Academy of Sciences (National Academy of Sciences, 2011), proposes markedly increasing the profile of engineering practices and concepts within the domain of K-12 science education. This is being proposed for several reasons, including that engineering provides a context in which students can apply new scientific knowledge to practical problems, thereby enhancing their understanding of, and interest in, science. This new focus on engineering provides a possible increased relevance for robots in K-12 core science education.
The challenge for curriculum developers and teachers looking to incorporate robots and engineering into the core science classrooms is to create educational experiences that continue to ensure that students learn the mandated science core concepts and practices, while concurrently exposing students to the central tenets of engineering design and making clear the links between engineering, technology, science and society. Though there are numerous commonalities between science and engineering, there are also significant points of departure that, if not addressed explicitly, make it very likely that activities that utilize robots will end up focusing primarily on the robotics, not on the science or engineering design skills. In these cases students are at risk of engaging in robotics without adequately answering the critical science questions of “Why does it happen?”, and “How does one know?” Conversely, a student can make use of pre-constructed and pre-programmed LEGO® robots and never engage in the design process. Experts in engineering and science tend to make the connections naturally to core science and mathematics concepts, and to the activity’s social relevance. Novice learners do not.
The authors are involved in an initiative to determine whether middle school physical science concepts can be effectively taught using LEGO® Mindstorm robots in the regular school classroom. Georgia Tech’s NSF Discovery Research K-12 program, Science Learning: Integrating Design, Engineering and Robotics (SLIDER) is a research project to create, implement and study the effects on student learning of an 8th grade Physical Science project-based inquiry learning (PBIL) curriculum. Built upon the foundation developed by the Georgia Tech research group led by Janet Kolodner (Kolodner et al., 2003) as part of the NSF-supported Learning by Design project, the SLIDER curriculum challenges students to solve engaging engineering-focused problems using engineering design practices and LEGO® Mindstorm robotics. Because the SLIDER curriculum is being implemented within the public schools in 8th grade standards-based physical science classrooms, the nonnegotiable first-level measure of student success is that students effectively master the physical science content and process skills spelled out in the Georgia Performance Standards.
In the SLIDER curriculum, every three students will form a team and work with their own robot for an extended period of time. The instructional materials guide students through the engineering practices of organizing a proposed challenge, defining criteria and constraints, and designing investigations using their LEGO® NXT kit. Through a process of iteration, students design ever better solutions to the challenge. However, students also spend ample time on the science side, making scientific claims, drawing on evidence to support the claims, and developing reasoned scientific explanations based on core scientific concepts. In the end, students are required to both apply their new knowledge to the initial engineering challenge, and also reflect on the more abstract scientific facts underpinning their solution, helping to ensure that they master the science content.
The student-to-robot ratio required in SLIDER, considered optimal in extracurricular and camp situations, creates substantial logistical challenges when implemented in public school classes, where each physical science teacher has 4-5 classes, each enrolling upwards of 30 8th grade students. SLIDER, as a research grant, will study the practicalities of having 50 LEGO® kits in a classroom, as well as researching the student learning outcomes of core science content and STEM process skills.
School System Partnerships
Affluent school systems, which often have engineers in their parent population, can generally field after-school teams without much support from the robotics competition state organizers. FLL® gives involved parents from those schools a constructive avenue for volunteering, and this parental involvement takes much of the burden off of the teachers and school system administrators. In contrast, low-income minority school systems that want to introduce their students to robotics generally need to do most of the coordinating at the school or system level. They do not have the same population of parent volunteers as the affluent schools, and rely on teachers to organize and mentor the teams. The NASA Electronic Professional Development Network (www.nasaepdn.gatech.edu), created by Georgia Tech’s Distance Education and Professional Education (DLPE) unit and CEISMC, offers a series of free, online courses for teachers to familiarize them with the fundamentals of how to build and program LEGO® Mindstorm robots, and how to use the robots in educational settings. The courses are available free of charge to teachers who are U.S. citizens, regardless of where they live.
To help promote FLL® in high-needs areas, it is critical that FLL® organizers actively partner with interested teachers and school administrators from low-income schools and provide them with support and understanding through the registration process. A flexible “We’ll work with you” attitude is crucial to increasing the number of low-income public schools that participate in programs such as FLL®. Holding aside competition spots and personally following up with school personnel is often necessary. It is also critical to schedule tournament events in their local area, as these teams tend to have much greater problems traveling substantial distances to attend events.
Georgia Tech, through CEISMC, is actively pursuing a number of research questions related to the use of robotics in education. One important strand is whether efforts to promote robotics within the school curriculum are effective and if they are realistic. Can core science content be effectively taught using robotics and engineering in regular science classes? Is it realistic to expect teachers to manage 50 or even 60 LEGO® Mindstorm kits in their classroom? Georgia Tech’s SLIDER program will specifically address these issues. A number of other groups are also actively pursuing these types of questions (Dyehouse, Diefes-Dux & Capobianco, 2011; Nathan, Walkington, Srisurichan & Alibali, 2011; Wendell et al., 2011). The answers are critical to determine if more minority students can be attracted to STEM fields by engaging them through the curricular integration of robotics.
As part of this research focus, CEISMC is developing an “Integrated STEM” course that will be piloted in 8th grade Engineering and Technology classrooms. Building on past experience with the ACES course, this new course, funded by the Georgia Department of Education through their Race to the Top award, will address all of the engineering and technology standards for the 8th grade, while incorporating core standards from math and science. The intent of the course is to develop an environment in the school where students will be introduced to real world problems and applications in math and science. They will then be able to return to their math and science classrooms to acquire the conceptual explanations needed to develop a rich understanding of mathematics, science, and the engineering design process.
At the start of each nine-week block, students will be presented with a specific engineering challenge. Each challenge will be tied to an over-arching theme that is selected to align with the math and science content pacing for the school system. Students will spend the first two or three weeks examining the background for each of these challenges. They will then form teams and start to design solutions using various components from the LEGO® Mindstorms kit. A strong emphasis on data logging and analysis will be included in each challenge.
The final section of each quarter will be an FLL®-style competition that will allow students to demonstrate solutions to the initial challenge. Students will also be required to develop a presentation that shares their entire journey through the design process. Having all students engage in competition within the school day provides an opportunity for the motivation and experience that seem to be needed for future STEM success
In order to shift the participation in an activity away from those people who historically have been the dominant players, it is necessary to track who is participating and why. If organizers of activities such as FLL® want to increase the diversity of the event, it is important that they collect adequate data about the participants in the tournament series. Georgia collects extensive data on every team that registers for the state tournament series, including student demographics, prior history of the team and the coach, and the circumstances surrounding how the team operates—whether it is curricular or extracurricular, how many hours are spent per week, whether they have mentors, etc. This provides the baseline data to use as a comparison for interventions.
In our experience, efforts to increase minority participation must take place along a number of parallel pathways: A) Changing centralized policies to promote success by minority students in the tournament, B) Working with community organizations to provide low income teams with training and supplies; C) Promoting the effective use of robotics within the school curriculum, where minority students can more easily participate, and D) Being patient and understanding about the challenges that low-income schools face when attempting to organize successful FLL® programs. None of these initiatives detract from the positive experience that the more affluent and traditionally represented students have within the FLL® program, and can make all the difference in promoting a positive experience and increased self-efficacy for children from other home and school situations. Though solid research data is lacking, this increased student self-efficacy, defined as the belief in one’s own ability to perform a particular task or achieve success in a given activity (Bandura, 1977, 1993, 1995) is anecdotally described in numerous testimonials about robotics competitions such as FLL®. Going forward, it is important to collect the research data to better determine exactly what it is about LEGO® and robotics that some students find so appealing, and what are the long-term effects on their academic performance.
This research was previously published in Robots in K-12 Education edited by Bradley S. Barker, Gwen Nugent, Neal Grandgenett, and Viacheslav I. Adamchuk, pages 326-342, copyright year 2012 by Information Science Reference (an imprint of IGI Global).
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Autonomous: The control of a robotics device by a pre-programmed set of commands with no concurrent human interaction.
Exploratory/Connections: The elective or assigned classes, not part of the core academic curriculum (i.e. Technology, Business and Fine Arts).
FIRST: The acronym for a not for profit organization committed to inspiring youth in science and technology through robotic competition. For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology
LEGO® Mindstorm NXT: The commercial product used as the required platform for the FIRST LEGO® League competition program.
Power Rating: The score associated to a team based on the experience level of the team.
Qualifier: The first level of competition that teams must participate in to advance in the competition.
Super Regional: A second level qualifier comprised of the top 25%-30% from specific qualifiers. This level is introduced when participation exceeds a reasonable level.