National Robotics Week

Maintaining effective instructional interactions between teachers and students around content is challenging, especially in open-ended problem-solving domains such as computer programming. Troubleshooting student programs at the classroom scale becomes difficult, even more so in remote or hybrid instructional contexts. Yet an instructor’s adaptability, insight, rapport with students, and leadership role in the classroom remain indispensable.

This Developing and Testing Innovations project will advance efforts of the Innovative Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers (ITEST) program to better understand and promote practices that increase students' knowledge and interest in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) and information and communication technology (ICT) careers by connecting faculty and undergraduate students at Illinois State University with students and teachers at four Chicago-area high schools and four Community-Based Organizations (CBOs) that serve the communities around them.

Hundreds of thousands of youth in the United States are involved in the juvenile justice system. This project seeks to provide new choices to confined youth by developing and investigating a robotics learning activities within a juvenile justice alternative education program. In addition, teachers need to be prepared to work with youth who have been involved in the juvenile justice system, so the project also engages pre-service teachers in mentoring the youth participants.

In the context of educational robotics, this RAPID project examines the educational equity potential of a task-oriented generative artificial intelligence (AI) tool to assist with creative productivity tasks in engineering design. This time-sensitive project will investigate how to support lower-performing learners through development and testing of an AI robot design assistant in a virtual robot-building game.

Advances in science and technology are shaping every aspect of our lives including education, work, healthcare, transportation, commerce, and entertainment. This societal transformation has created an increasing demand for a workforce well-trained in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields and representative of societal diversity. To meet this demand, the K-12 educational environment is witnessing a growing focus on engaging and exposing all students to advance technologies.

Our modern technological age is witnessing the pervasive impact of technology on healthcare, transportation, education, commerce, and entertainment. Thus, there is great demand for a well-prepared STEM workforce. To address this need for a tech-savvy workforce, government, corporate, and education sectors are all focused on creating and offering innovative teaching, learning, and training opportunities for students at all levels.