Intellectual Merit: This project focused on exploiting K-12 students’ fascination with robots by using this as a hook to stimulate them to learn science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) subjects while synergistically broadening the training of graduate students and providing rigorous professional development to K-12 teachers. Each year, after a summer of preparation and training—involving a pedagogy workshop, a robotics workshop, and lesson planning and development—Fellows and teachers began their partnership to engage, mentor, and challenge students through mechatronics, robotics, and engineering activities, culminating in students’ participation in the city-wide FIRST LEGO League (FLL) competition. These activities, organized around the FLL competition and frequently embedded in the classroom, enabled students to develop, apply, and enhance their STEM skills.

According to an external evaluation report (2009—10), pre- and post-project evaluation of graduate Fellows’ presentations in three critical domains revealed a statistically significant gain in Fellows’ ability to communicate complex STEM concepts to lay audiences. According to the external evaluation, from 2009 to 2012, teachers reported changes in letter grades for ≈3,200 project students: 70.8% saw their science, math, and overall grades improve half or one full letter grade. All project teachers reported the following impacts from their partnership with the Fellows: emphasis on the application of STEM in real-world settings; knowledge of current science and technology; and increased ability to use robotics and computers in teaching. To date, 46 graduate Fellows, mentored by 18 faculty, have performed research and widely published their engineering research. We have developed over 110 engineering-based, standards-aligned, K-12 science and math activity lessons of which over 70 have been published on Teachengineering.org (see link below).

http://engineering.nyu.edu/gk12/amps-cbri/html/resources/Teachengineering.html

A personal communication by an editor of Teachengineering.org in January 2016 indicated: “Your 66 LEGO activities had a total of 106,730 page views in 2015. Five of those activities were in our ‘top 10’ for the year.” Per a follow-up communication: “8 of NYU’s lessons/activities were in the top quartile of our page views for 2015 (>3,000 page views). Another 18 of NYU’s lessons/activities fall above the median (1,000 page views).” The aforementioned page view data reflects the popularity of our robotics-based STEM lessons.

As delineated below, through a series of studies, we have investigated: Whether the motivational power and new affordances of robotics can be effectively harnessed to positively influence the learning of science and math in K-12 environment? First, we have analyzed the effectiveness of several LEGO Mindstorms-based science and math lessons (elementary, middle, and high school grades) using pre- and post-lesson assessment surveys and statistical hypothesis tests. Second, we have led a study that utilized low-intensity resources (e.g., a short training workshop, user-guides, and building and programming instructions), self-efficacy and engineering design performance instruments, and video analysis to assess the skills gained by K-12 mentors and teachers with varied levels of education, teaching, and prior robotics expertise. Third, we conducted a mindful design of robotics-based activities, centered on Bloom’s taxonomy, to investigate the effectiveness of connecting cognitive domains of Bloom’s taxonomy and robotics...

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