Monthly Highlight: National Robotics Week
It’s engineering, and it’s programming, and it’s inspiring—it’s National Robotics Week! From April 6–14, there will be in-person and virtual events for students from preschool to college age to introduce and celebrate robotics and STEM-related learning.
Since 2010, the organizers of National Robotics Week (RoboWeek) have promoted events, activities, and media designed to showcase the wide variety of robots and their many real-world applications. Robotics combines STEM fields such as engineering and technology with creativity and problem-solving, and RoboWeek shows how much fun that can be.
There are free resources for every age group, as well as listings of upcoming events, on the RoboWeek website. (National All-Star Robot Trading Cards, anyone?) But the underlying mission of National Robotics Week is educational, as it seeks to inspire young people to become interested in robotics and other STEM careers.
RoboWeek definitely aligns with the ITEST goal of advancing the equitable and inclusive integration of technology in the learning and teaching of STEM from pre-kindergarten through high school. Check out these projects and other related materials!
- Integrating Robotics and Socio-emotional Learning for Incarcerated Middle-School Students. 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 robotics learning activities within a juvenile justice alternative education program. To prepare teachers to work with youth who have been involved in the juvenile justice system, the project also engages pre-service teachers in mentoring youth participants. The robotics activities include elements of socio-emotional learning such as responsible decision-making, self-awareness, social awareness, and collaborating with others. The curriculum will inspire these students to reenter their education with an interest in pursuing STEM as a future career.
- Unlocking the Potential of Generative AI for Equity and Access in Robotics Education. Education In the context of educational robotics, this project examines the educational equity potential of a task-oriented generative artificial intelligence (AI) tool to assist with creative productivity tasks in engineering design. The 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. Research will evaluate the design and implementation of the task-oriented generative AI tool and test the potential of generative AI assistance to close the equity gap in this specific context.
- STEM-based University Pathway Encouraging Relationships with Chicago High schools in Automation, Robotics and Green Energy. This project connects 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. The project is based on the exploration of STEM-focused technologies, including robotics, solar energy, and electric vehicles, and aims to serve students from populations that are underrepresented in STEM fields. Students will meet after school once per week to engage in informal, hands-on STEM educational activities. During the summers, students will attend a three-day STEM camp to apply and extend the knowledge they have gained throughout the year and learn about STEM educational and career pathways through field trips and guest speakers from STEM industries. Teachers at each of the high schools will serve as mentors for the students.
- Using AI to Focus Teacher-Student Troubleshooting in Classroom Robotics. 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 project will explore the use of Machine Learning (ML) algorithms to offload the time-consuming tasks of finding and deciphering student errors while also focusing teacher-student troubleshooting interactions around algorithmically identified episodic "clips" of student work-in-progress. This approach differs from the current state of the art in that it neither replaces nor simply informs the teacher, but instead convenes students and instructors around instructionally rich portions of the students’ own code and output.
Nominate Your Program: PreK-12 STEM Education Innovations That Work
To inform a study by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), Education Development Center is compiling a compendium of successfully scaled-up preK-12 STEM education programs and initiatives, including those involving computer and data science. The consensus study will be shared along with recommendations with federal agencies, state and local educational agencies, and other relevant stakeholders looking for successful scale-up practices and barriers to scaling in STEM education. Are you connected to a program that could be considered for inclusion in this compendium?
Compendium inclusion will:
- Highlight your program as a successful preK-12 STEM innovation
- Share information about your program with a broad audience of important STEM education stakeholders
- Ensure your program’s unique work is included in discussions regarding STEM education innovations
To nominate your program for consideration, please fill out this brief nomination form. Before nominating a project, please review our website for more information on the study and our project qualifications FAQ.
Nominations will be reviewed on a rolling basis. The final deadline to submit nomination forms is May 1, 2024.
If you have any questions, please reach out to PreK12STEMInnovations@edc.org.
Thanks for your time, and we look forward to hearing from you!
2024 ITEST PI Meeting Update
Attending the 2024 PI Meeting in Alexandria, Virginia? Take a sneak peek at our planned agenda by clicking the button below! If you haven’t completed your registration, act fast! The deadline to book your hotel room is April 12th. Reach out to us at stelar@edc.org with any questions.