Emily Hamner

The Robotic Autonomy Mobile Robotics Course: Robot Design, Curriculum Design and Educational Assessment

Robotic Autonomy is a seven-week, hands-on introduction to robotics designed for high school students. The course presents a broad survey of robotics, beginning with mechanism and electronics and ending with robot behavior, navigation and remote teleoperation. During the summer of 2002, Robotic Autonomy was taught to twenty eight students at Carnegie Mellon West in cooperation with NASA/Ames (Moffett Field, CA). The educational robot and course curriculum were the result of a ground-up design effort chartered to develop an effective and low-cost robot for secondary level education and home use. Cooperation between Carnegie Mellons Robotics Institute, Gogoco, LLC. and Acroname Inc. yielded notable innovations including a fast-build robot construction kit, indoor/outdoor terrainability, CMOS vision-centered sensing, back-EMF motor speed control and a Java-based robot programming interface. In conjunction with robot and curriculum design, the authors at the Robotics Institute and the University of Pittsburghs Learning Research and Development Center planned a methodology for evaluating the educational efficacy of Robotic Autonomy, implementing both formative and summative evaluations of progress as well as an in-depth, one week ethnography to identify micro-genetic mechanisms of learning that would inform the broader evaluation. This article describes the robot and curriculum design processes and then the educational analysis methodology and statistically significant results, demonstrating the positive impact of Robotic Autonomy on student learning well beyond the boundaries of specific technical concepts in robotics.

Formal measures of learning in a secondary school mobile robotics course

During the summer of 2002, Robotic Autonomy was taught to thirty students at Carnegie Mellon West in cooperation with NASA/Ames (Moffett Field, CA). The authors at Carnegie Mellon Universitys Robotics Institute and at the University of Pittsburghs Learning Research and Development Center planned a methodology for formally evaluating the educational efficacy of Robotic Autonomy. This article describes the educational analysis methodology and the statistically significant results of our analysis, demonstrating the positive impact of Robotic Autonomy on student learning beyond the boundaries of specific technical concepts in robotics. Educational robotics is gaining traction at all levels of the educational system, however formal analysis of its effectiveness has been lacking. This research project seeks to address this weakness by presenting statistically significant evidence of broad learning.

CSbots: design and deployment of a robot designed for the CS1 classroom

We present CSbots, an ongoing program to use robots as educational tools in the Introduction to Computer Science CS1) course. We aim to use robotics to improve learning and retention by altering course work so that it is more relevant to students. In our development process we use an iterative cycle composed of design, pilot, and evaluation steps. We have completed the first of these cycles, the alpha cycle, and describe the robot hardware, software, and curriculum development processes as well as key evaluation results from pilots conducted at two community colleges in Fall 2007. We discuss the implications of these results and our experiences on the in-progress beta design cycle and planned pilots.

A strategy for collaborative outreach: lessons from the CSbots project

Many efforts are being made to improve computer science education in order to address the retention and motivation of students. These efforts rely on the development of educational tools and environments, tools that, when successful, require many years to integrate into the computer science education community. We introduce a strategy that both speeds uptake in the community and improves the chances of the project creating an educationally successful tool. The strategy hinges on creating an initial community of educators before an educational tool is fully mature but at the point at which it becomes usable by teachers. While this is somewhat analogous to the beta-testing communities in software development, our aim is for the community to drive the underlying design in significant ways. Our context is CSbots, a project to develop a robot, software environment, and associated curricula for introductory computer science education. We detail our collaborative outreach effort, which resulted in the concurrent creation of a community of 30 invested educators and a well aligned educational tool ready for broad dissemination.

A visual robot-programming environment for multidisciplinary education

Arts & Bots is an educational program that aims to broaden diversity and participation in technology by integrating arts and crafts with robotics. Arts & Bots is a flexible program that can be integrated into in-school and out-of-school programs in many subject areas. This paper describes the visual programming environment developed for Arts & Bots and its goals of low barriers to entry, classroom compatibility, supporting student acquisition of computational thinking skills, and enabling complex robot behaviors. The authors also compare and contrast the programming environment with other popular visual programming environments, namely Scratch, Alice and LEGO NXT-G.

The Design of a Highly Reliable Robot for Unmediated Museum Interaction

Installation of a robot system in a publicly accessible technical museum poses nontrivial problems along three axes. First, the robot must be reliable, both by failing rarely in spite of continuous, daily use and by allowing museum staff to easily return the robot to service. Second, the robot must perform without the need for staff intervention, from system autonomy to energetics enabling full-day operation without battery replacement. Third, the user-end interaction software must be self-explanatory as well as instructional and engaging in order to effectively communicate the learning goals of the exhibit. In this paper we describe the design of such a robot system and share early results regarding its successful deployment at five museums across the United States.

A Roadmap for Technology Literacy and a Vehicle for Getting There: Educational Robotics and the TeRK Project

Current technology literacy trends in the United States show declining interest and engagement in technological fields of study. We propose a roadmap by which robotics applications can enliven technology education and capture the interest of new students. We also describe our current efforts to design appropriate technologies and apply them at the middle school, high school, and college levels

Utilizing engineering to teach non-technical disciplines: Case studies of robotics within middle school English and health classes

When engineering and computing activities are solely electives, extra curriculars, or informal learning activities, student participation is limited by self-selection. By integrating technological projects into required coursework, all students gain exposure. The Arts & Bots Math and Science Partnership integrates creative robotics into middle school classes such as English and history as transdisciplinary, creative robotics projects. We discuss two case studies of such projects, describing how teachers developed projects through sequential implementations; and how project instruction focuses on developing student technological fluency, collaboration, and understanding of class content. One case study describes the integration of Arts & Bots into 7th and 8th grade English Language Arts in which students build robotic sculptures that represent a poem or scene in a play. The second case study describes a 7th grade Health and Physical Education project in which students build models of human joints and limbs in order to understand muscle pairs. We discuss differences, themes, and best practices for integration of creative robotics into non-technical classes through a comparison of projects implemented to date. The case studies are supplemented by data from student (N=195) and teacher (N=6) evaluations.

Training teachers to integrate engineering into non-technical middle school curriculum

The Arts & Bots Math and Science Partnership program integrates creative technological fluency projects as transdisciplinary activities into non-technical courses, creating a pathway for students of all abilities and areas of interests to engage with engineering and computing. The Professional Development provided by the program prepares teachers from traditional disciplines, such as English, History or Science, to integrate robotics projects into disciplinary classrooms, and aims to promote teacher skill, confidence, and self-efficacy in the design and classroom implementation of robotics design projects. The Arts & Bots project has developed and piloted a new program for in-service secondary school teachers. To date, we have trained 38 teachers from a variety of disciplines to implement Arts & Bots robotics design projects in their classrooms. Teacher training integrates experience with robotics kit components, a programming interface, the engineering design process, and recognition of student affinities towards engineering and computer science. We present the development model for our teacher training program as well as preliminary positive results regarding teacher practice and self-efficacy. Data includes teacher surveys, interviews, and class observations. Teacher training has developed over the course of several years, and we discuss how teacher experiences have shaped the development of the program to its current form.

Reports of the AAAI 2010 spring symposia

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, in cooperation with Stanford University’s Department of Computer Science, is pleased to present the 2010 Spring Symposium Series, to be held Monday through Wednesday, March 22–24, 2010 at Stanford University. The titles of the seven symposia are Artificial Intelligence for Development; Cognitive Shape Processing; Educational Robotics and Beyond: Design and Evaluation; Embedded Reasoning: Intelligence in Embedded Systems Intelligent Information Privacy Management; It’s All in the Timing: Representing and Reasoning about Time in Interactive Behavior; and Linked Data Meets Artificial Intelligence.