Teaching Through Touching: Using Research to Motivate Education

该项目的目的是使工程教育吸引所有背景，种族和性别的学生，包括开放式研究的兴奋，即学生和教师都不知道正确的答案。该项目利用PI在过去5年中开发的ROBOLAB工具集，该工具集是乐高硬件和LabVIEW软件的组合，允许学生预测，调查，测试和理解数学，科学和工程。ROBOLAB为所有年龄段的学生设计，提供工具，让学生自信，满足他们的好奇心，理解数学和科学。该项目通过将虚拟世界与ROBOLAB的真实的世界相结合，结合了研究和教育的新方向，并测试了新的非正式教育工作，包括将数学，科学和工程教育与电影院和互联网相结合。该项目的目标是调查研究生和大学生如何学习工程，通过将其与化学机械平面化（半导体制造中的表面抛光工艺）研究相结合来增强机器人工具集，并增加所有机构（K-12和大学）的合作致力于将开放式研究问题作为教学方法带入课堂。该项目包括教育和工程研究生团队，教师团队，一些在工程，一些在教育，并与行业，政府机构和国际科学中心，为这些努力提供支持和传播结构的合作伙伴。

The aim of this project is to make engineering education attractive to students of all backgrounds, races, and gender by including the excitement of open-ended research, i.e. neither student nor teacher knows the right answer. The project utilizes the ROBOLAB toolset, developed by the PI over the past 5 years, which is a combination of LEGO hardware and LabVIEW software and allows students to predict, investigate, test, and understand math, science, and engineering. ROBOLAB, designed for students of all ages, provides the tools and gives students self-confidence to satisfy their curiosity and to understand math and science. The project combines new directions in both research and education by integrating the virtual world with the real world of ROBOLAB, and tests new informal education efforts, that include integrating math, science, and engineering education with movie cinemas and the Internet. The goals of the project are to investigate how the kindergartner and the university students learn engineering, to enhance the robotics toolset by combining it with the chemical-mechanical planarization (surface polishing process in semiconductor manufacturing) research, and to increase the collaboration of all institutions (K-12 and university) dedicated toward bringing open-ended research problems into the classroom as a teaching method. The project includes education and engineering graduate student teams, a faculty team, some in engineering, some in education, and partners with industry, government institutions, and international science centers, which provide support and dissemination structures for these efforts.