Carnegie Mellon University proposes a project, called Robot Diaries, that aims to attract and engage a new group of middle school students in computing. With Robot Diaries, students use familiar materials along with motors, lights, and computation to design affective, programmable, tangible communication devices. They animate their creations with emotional expression in the context of collaborative storytelling. Robot Diaries motivates middle-school aged children to engage with technology as creators and authors rather than simply as consumers, and it increases students? confidence in their ability to be creative with technology. This proposal builds on three years of pilot Robot Diaries projects that included multiple rounds of participatory design with students and teachers, and a preliminary analysis of the impact of this program on learning and self-confidence. With this proposal, the audience for Robot Diaries will be significantly expanded ? with an emphasis on girls and underrepresented minorities ? through collaboration with the Pittsburgh public school system and schools in the suburban and rural regions of southwestern Pennsylvania. The project will create and deploy its new curriculum through co-design with local teachers.
Arts & Bots, previously called Robot Diaries, combines a custom programming software tool with intrinsically creative craft materials and authentic robotics components. Using these tools, students from kindergarten through graduate studies create expressive, interactive robotic devices. Through this project we have worked closely with teachers to develop curriculum integrating hands on technology and engineering experiences into middle school courses such as anatomy, poetry, English, history, and art. Eleven teachers and 256 students have participated in the formal research and evaluation efforts. We have established partnerships with the June Harless Center at Marshall University (Huntington, West Virginia), ASSET Inc. (Pittsburgh, PA) and Carlow University (Pittsburgh, PA). These partners have incorporated Arts & Bots training into their ongoing professional development offerings to both in-service and pre-service teachers. Extending beyond the research participants, an additional 191 teachers attended free training offered by CMU and 149 teachers attended training offered by our partners, representing a total of at least 40 school districts and approximately 1500 students participating in Arts & Bots implementation over the past 4 years. Through partnership with participating teachers we have published an online curricula library of eight full curricula in a variety of disciplines. More importantly we have developed and refined a professional development workshop which empowers teachers to develop their own customized Arts & Bots curriculum. Through this project the Arts & Bots hardware kit has been refined for classroom use and licensed to BirdBrain Technologies for national and international sale. BirdBrain Technologies averages 180 sales per month of the Hummingbird Robotics Kit and estimates that roughly 200 educational institutions have purchased the kit in the past 18 months. Simultaneously we have released an open-source visual programming environment which was developed to complement the Arts & Bots hardware kit as an easy to learn tool for first time programmers. Building on a programming-as-storyboarding analogy, the software allows novice programmers to implement simple programs with ease while still incorporating computing ideas that allow for a high ceiling of complex robot behaviors. This software had to be structured such that even non-technology teachers, with little experience and limited classroom time to devote to programming instruction, could integrate the software into their lessons successfully. This project’s work included major revisions to the user interface of our prototype software and back-end modifications to make the software compatible with school computing environments based on teacher feedback. The software is freely available online and promoted in hardware kit documentation. The software was also adapted for another introductory educational robot, the Finch robot, to promote continuity in school districts using both robot systems as part of their computing education pipeline. Evaluation of research data collected through the project is ongoing. Preliminary results from student survey and interview data suggest that students participating in Arts & Bots projects gain a more realistic view of engineering and robotics applications, with hesitant students becoming much more confident and overconfident students becoming more grounded in their understanding of the complexity of such systems. One 8th grade Arts & Bots student summed up her response as follows: "I learned that it takes dedication and not necessarily a level of smartness to understand the robots…. And if you set your mind to anything, you can do whatever you want." 8th grade Arts & Bots student Preliminary evidence also suggests that not only do Arts & Bots projects provide students with a positive STEM learning experience, but they can also help students learn non-STEM content. For example one teacher explained how in the midst of working on her robot a student suddenly saw beyond the literal interpretation of her assigned poem and grasped its deeper meaning. A final outcome of this work is the development of evaluation tools for measuring student attitudes towards technology and technical knowledge. In particular the survey instrument for measuring student attitudes and confidence towards technology and robotics has an excellent Cronbach's alpha of .969 on the 35 item scale for 96 participants.
