The aim of this project is to make engineering education attractive to students of all backgrounds, races, and gender by including the excitement of open-ended research, i.e. neither student nor teacher knows the right answer. The project utilizes the ROBOLAB toolset, developed by the PI over the past 5 years, which is a combination of LEGO hardware and LabVIEW software and allows students to predict, investigate, test, and understand math, science, and engineering. ROBOLAB, designed for students of all ages, provides the tools and gives students self-confidence to satisfy their curiosity and to understand math and science. The project combines new directions in both research and education by integrating the virtual world with the real world of ROBOLAB, and tests new informal education efforts, that include integrating math, science, and engineering education with movie cinemas and the Internet.
The goals of the project are to investigate how the kindergartner and the university students learn engineering, to enhance the robotics toolset by combining it with the chemical-mechanical planarization (surface polishing process in semiconductor manufacturing) research, and to increase the collaboration of all institutions (K-12 and university) dedicated toward bringing open-ended research problems into the classroom as a teaching method. The project includes education and engineering graduate student teams, a faculty team, some in engineering, some in education, and partners with industry, government institutions, and international science centers, which provide support and dissemination structures for these efforts.
