The City as Learning Lab (CaLL) is a comprehensive research and development initiative designed to create new measures of audience impact in technology experiences; identify features of university-community collaboration that facilitate sustainable community programs; and produce a set of tools and resources that allow other cities to tailor creative robotics programs to unique audiences. Project partners include the University of Pittsburgh Center for Learning in Out-of-School Environments (UPCLOSE), the Community Robotics Education and Technology Empowerment (CREATE) lab at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute, and the Georgia Institute of Technology as well as local museums, community organizations, and afterschool clubs. CaLL builds on the work of three existing youth technology programs in Pittsburgh targeting audiences ages 9-15: the Robot Diaries, Neighborhood Nets, and Robot 250. Research questions relate to creative processes in informal learning settings, use of robotics to engage diverse audiences, and changes in technological fluency after students leave the informal learning setting and apply their new knowledge and skills at home or in other learning contexts. The research incorporates data from up to 1000 program participants. Findings will establish evidence for how technological fluency can be measured, supported, and developed through informal technology learning experiences. Project deliverables include a CaLL curriculum, toolkit, new measures of audience impact, and identification of factors that support university/community collaborations. Broader impacts in informal technology education will be achieved by developing flexible toolkits that allow other communities to adapt and adopt CaLL technologies, curricula, and activities.
An interdisciplinary team of designers, robotics researchers, and learning scientists explored ways for diverse audiences in a city to engage with robotics in ways that were personally relevant, expressive, and visible to other people in the city. The project was intended to discover new strategies for engaging underrepresent groups in STEM activities and to create new ways of working between universities and communities that can improve broader impacts of scientific research as well as connect researchers more directly to the concerns of communities. The project pursued three separate, though linked, strands of investigation. 1. NEIGHBORHOOD NETWORKS. These projects were moments when the researchers worked most closely with hyper-local questions of how robotics might be imagined to be part of the future of various people’s lives. These experiences were speculative design moments, where we work shopped with communities to identify issues that robotics might address – often issues that involved the robotic collection of data such as air quality, noise, traffic, etc. We tested a series of participatory design activities to introduce participants to sensing and robotic technologies in the context of the neighborhood. Through workshop activities participants identified three related local concerns, produced concepts about how to take action to address those concerns using sensing technology and developed models or prototype devices to demonstrate those concepts. Example concepts realized included 1) a large, public monitoring display to track and display air quality in the neighborhood, 2) traffic monitoring of a local bridge undergoing major rehabilitation and an associated local radio broadcast and web channel to inform residents and commuters of bridge related traffic information, community news and local stories, 3) a pedestrian activated stop signal. The prototype devices and models they developed were put on display in various locations that sometimes emphasized sharing with neighborhoods (to encourage joint action and attention to a neighborhood project), or sometimes emphasized share with the whole city to communicate an important and potentially unknown message about the neighborhood to the people from other parts of the city. 2. ROBOT DIARIES. This second strand of work was intended to provide deeper experiences for committed participants who not only designed a robot, but who spent weeks working to learn the technologies necessary to actually build, program, and troubleshoot the robot. Children have frequent access to technologies such as computers, game systems, and mobile phones. But it is useful to distinguish between engaging with technology as a ‘consumer’ and engaging as a ‘creator’ or designer – the former can use technology efficiently, while the latter are also creative and adaptive. How can we encourage movement along this continuum? Participants use arts and crafts supplies to build robots. The workshops typically focus on expressive uses of robotics, for example one group of middle-school girls built robots that served as actors in a play they wrote as part of the workshop. Our research focused on the development of three habits of mind associated with fluent technology engagement: (1) approaching technology as a tool and a creative medium; (2) understanding how to engage in a design process; and (3) seeing oneself as competent to engage in technological creativity. Blending art and engineering, Robot Diaries was designed to support multiple pathways to technological fluency. Our findings suggested two distinct patterns of engagement – an engineering focus (characterized by attention to the structure and function of the robot) and an artistic focus (characterized by attention to the robot’s representational capacity). The ability to support and sustain multiple levels of participation is an important quality in a workshop designed to broaden engagement with technology. C. ROBOT 250. As part of Pittsburgh’s 250th anniversary, we staged a two week robot festival for the city of Pittsburgh in July 2008. The festival spanned more than 17 community partners (including most of the museums and the public parks) and 600 family and individual students and participants, all of whom have been directly exposed to the creative technologies designed for our project and all of whom have been given the support and space to invent new communicative devices in an issue-centric format. Exhibitions resulting from the work of commissioned artist as well as the 600 participants yielded more than 15 discrete locales which have together counted greater than 90,000 public attendees during the festival. We collected a wide range of data around the festival to document the individual, community, and city-wide impact of the event. The installations were successful in shift views of robotics, with people who interacted with the installations more likely to view robots as creative, problem-solving, and locally relevant than people who did not view installations.
