“Look At My Robot!”
Robotics as a constructionist mechanism for STEM learning.
The field of robotics has grown at an incredible rate, and is starting to be used for education. We have now reached a stage where many companies are developing robotic building kits and toys that can be introduced in educational settings to engage students to learn and practice STEM concepts. Many of these tools engage kids in hands-on constructionist-style learning activities. As a result, robotics is becoming very popular in a wide variety of learning environments, and there are options for everyone to engage in robotics activities from large scale robotics clubs and competitions to the classroom, after school, and holiday camps.
Research has found that the use of robotics can provide a fun engaging way to get learners to develop 21st-Century skills, which are considered pertinent for success in jobs of the future. Robotics in learning environments can be an effective tool to enhance creativity, problem-solving skills, critical thinking and programming skills to students.
Two approaches are commonly used to introduce robots in learning environments. The first approach involves fully functional prefabricated robots as tools learners can program. Known as the “black box” approach, learners do not engage in the building of the robot but they investigate ways to engage with the robots’ capabilities through programming and designing other activities around the robot. The second approach, known as the “white box” approach, involves learners putting together the parts of the robot to construct the robot itself and then programming the robot. Most activities including robotics competitions are focused on this approach by engaging learners to design and program the robots themselves.
In recent work conducted in the HCIL at University of Maryland, we look at ways the white-box and black-box approaches can be blended into a single learning experience. This idea was explored during a summer camp at a local church with 49 children aged 7–13 years old. Robotics activities during the summer camp were focused on engaging young learners to program Sphero robots to navigate through mazes they construct using inexpensive arts and crafts materials such as construction paper, paper plates, pipe cleaners and tape. The goal for combining such high-tech and low-tech material is to explore if and how prebuilt robots can provide generative, alternative approaches for young students to engage with robotics through construction while still maintaining some of the benefits of conventional robotics construction activities. Robotics activities for this camp were designed around the Sphero robot, a spherical programmable robot that uses both graphical and textual programming languages and can be programmed using tablets or smartphones.
The Sphero robot includes motors, accelerometers, LED lights, and uses Bluetooth to communicate with a tablet. The Sphero programming language includes primitives to make the Sphero move, respond to external inputs (such as collisions), change colors, make the tablet produce noise, along with containing conventional programming constructs such as iterative logic, conditional logic, variables, and functions.
Students were asked to use the low-tech arts-and-crafts materials provided to design activities that could engage their robots to solve challenges they will design for the robots. True to constructionist ideals, students used the robots and the materials provided to create new ways to engage with robots and computing. Students drew most of their inspiration from prior knowledge and ideas about their everyday lives, to build environments suitable for the robot to navigate. For example, one group of students built a course for their robot to navigate and included stop signs and stops for errands along the way, in this way, their robot path reflects the drive their parents make going to and from work each day
Other students-built constructions where the robot played roles such a mailman delivering mail, a shopper needing to scan barcodes as they shopped, a pizza delivery person making deliveries, and constructions representing car washes and gas stations with the robots playing the role of a car making stops at these stations.
In constructing for robots, students deeply engaged in construction and programming practices, with the programming and construction mutually supporting each other as the students progressed in their designs and constructions. Learners simultaneously worked on the designs and program practices that are distinct from conventional robot construction activities. Such mutually informing practices allowed the learners to actively engage and think critically about the design and programming processes at the same time. An example of how constraints encountered during programming the robot shaped the physical construction was seen when one group introduced a traffic light to their environment in the form of wooden discs they had painted red, green, and orange to represent traffic lights. During their discussion on how to integrate this feature into their design, one learner raised the challenge of interactivity between the wooden disc and the robot. As the students discussed, an idea came up from one learner to rather use stop signs instead of traffic lights to overcome the challenge of interactivity saying “When it gets here (pointing to the floor), it has to stop then wait for like 3 seconds just like when you are driving you to have a stop sign and [another learner] was saying something about the traffic light, but we don’t really know how to make it work”. Several instances were seen where the constructions the learners made shaped the programs they authored and vice versa, with the constructions serving as the motivation for programming.
Constructing for robots provides unique affordances that can lead to productive outcomes typically seen in conventional robotics activities and provide low barrier entry to younger learners without strong skills in engineering and programming. Further, such activities allow learners to draw on their prior knowledge and lived experiences to create meaningful contexts for learning to happen. Younger learners could be seen interacting with the robot directly either by picking it or returning it to the start position or actively participating fully as members of the group without the burden of being shoved aside for lack of programming competence or engineering experience traditionally required in robotics activities.
In creating these constructing-for-robots learning environments, we provide pathways for students to engage with new tools, explore and tinker with the material they are familiar with, and express their ideas in ways that robotics toolkits on their own cannot afford. In our pursuit to develop 21st-Century skills in learners, not only should we focus on how to build new robots to enhance what we already know but we should explore opportunities to find new ways to engage with, add, or create new meanings around existing robots.
