DRK-12 Collaborative Full Design and Development Proposal Changing Culture In Robotics Classrooms (CCRC)

PROJECT SUMMARY
This project, Changing Culture in Robotics Classrooms, is a DRK-12 Full Design and Development
Proposal that addresses each of the four DRK-12 research and development strands. The project focuses
on developing innovative curriculum that places students from grades 5 through 12 into activities that
promote computational thinking practices as it teaches creativity, abstraction, algorithms, and
programming; four Big Ideas of Computer Science identified in a number of national policy documents.

There is a growing recognition that computational and algorithmic thinking are new basic skills that all
K-12 students must learn. The brains of robotic systems are driven by Computer Science (CS) and the
computational thinking that CS education produces. Unfortunately, very few schools in the United States
offer significant CS courses offerings, yet more and more schools are offering robotics. When students
study robotics systems they have the opportunity to develop the computational thinking and practices
promoted by CS Principles, but currently that does not happen in the majority of robotics education
classrooms. Carnegie Mellons Robotics Academy (CMRA) and the University of Pittsburghs Learning
Research and Development Center (LRDC) have identified three main issues that inhibit students learning
CS in robotics classrooms; teacher preparation, course content, and access to resources. This project
develops a comprehensive set of resources, models, and tools designed to address those needs.

The project builds on CMRAs broad reach into the robotics education community, LRDCs years of
experience with the construction and evaluation of Design Based Leaning units, and a combination of
research-based tools developed during a ten year CMRA/LRDC partnership where we have studied how
teachers implement robotics education in their classrooms and developed curriculum designed to
foreground specific principles leading to significant learning gains. This full design and development
proposal designs a set of scalable Model Eliciting Activities-based units and trains teachers how to use
them, empowering them to create a broad and diverse pool of students who are well prepared and
motivated to take advanced computer science (CS) courses and compete in our CS driven economy.

INTELLECTUAL MERIT
Relatively little is known about the progression of programming and computational thinking skills that
students do or do not learn in robotics classrooms. Our observation of thousands of competition teams,
interaction with thousands of teachers in professional development, and direct observation of dozens of
classrooms over the last decade suggests that students typically develop some basic programming skills but
little in the way of computational thinking practices. Research from this project will answer the following
questions:

1. What kinds of resources are useful for motivating and preparing teachers/students to teach/learn
computational thinking and practices thinking through robotics education?
2. Where do teachers struggle most in teaching CS principles and what kinds of supports are needed to
address these weaknesses?
3. Can virtual environments be used to significantly increase access to CS? And if yes, what level of
computational thinking and practices can be taught and how can this be advanced?

BROADER IMPACTS
Robotics is highly motivating to students; there are over 30,000 documented robotics teams in the
United States, yet prohibitive hardware costs limit implementation in many schools. This project develops
and rigorously tests Robot Virtual World software that is 95% less expensive to implement and 40% more
efficient than hardware-based robotics education platforms. The research from this project will produce
empirical findings that contribute to knowledge about the use of game like simulations to facilitate CS
learning across the K-16 continuum. While girls comprise 40% of robotics competition participants at the
middle school level and 20% at the high school level, female participation in traditional computer
science courses is in the single digit level. If we can show that robotics can teach CS big ideas and
computational thinking and practices, this will go a long way towards increasing the percentage of girls
that are CS literate and prepared to study advanced CS courses, and ultimately pursue careers in CS.

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