STTR Phase II: A Low Cost Robotics kit for Elementary Education

STTR 第二阶段：用于基础教育的低成本机器人套件

• 批准号: 1831177
• 负责人: Tom Lauwers
• 金额: $ 75万
• 依托单位: BirdBrain Technologies
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2018
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2018-08-15 至 2021-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1831177&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: STTR; Phase; II; Low; Cost

This STTR Phase II project supports standards-based math education in elementary school classrooms with a hands-on technology intervention. Research has shown that many elementary teachers suffer from low confidence and limited subject content knowledge in math and struggle to develop instruction designed to meet or exceed common core math learning goals. Teachers and researchers alike seek new approaches to engage students and improve teacher effectiveness to improve learning outcomes. The primary goal of this project is the development of a flexible, user-friendly, hands-on robotics kit with associated curriculum and support for teachers, that will engage students in learning math content, align with core curriculum, and measurably increase student achievement. The commercialization of this research-based classroom kit will enable school districts to adopt active learning into their math pedagogy. Ultimately, this promotes the NSF mission to increase national prosperity through science innovation by improving math preparation for students across the United States and preparing them to participate in careers that drive the advancement of science and technology.The core contribution of this work is composed of a flexible hardware kit to enable active learning within the core elementary curriculum as well as more traditional maker activities, and a suite of apps that allow students to use this kit to learn specific math content while also providing options to learn computational thinking through general purpose programming apps. To accomplish this, the team employs a proven design process in which hardware, software, and curriculum are simultaneously designed to align to learner goals, evaluated in classroom studies, and iteratively refined. The kit will combine the ease of use and simplicity of a regular snap-together style electronics kit with the flexibility of a programmable microcontroller. The apps developed for this project will build on a new math-based paradigm for robot programming. These math-oriented apps will remove the barrier of programming skills for elementary teachers and students alike when using the electronics kit for math instruction. Simultaneously, programming apps will enable open-ended explorations of making and computational thinking. Another contribution of this project will be the testing and analysis of the hardware system and complementary math curricula. Formative evaluation will enable exploration and understanding of novel mechanisms for learning math, and evaluation of the program's efficacy will enable characterization of the impact on student outcomes in math achievement and attitudes towards math.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

这一STTR第二阶段项目通过动手技术干预，在小学课堂上支持基于标准的数学教育。研究表明，许多小学教师对数学缺乏信心，学科内容知识有限，难以制定旨在达到或超过共同核心数学学习目标的教学。教师和研究人员都在寻找新的方法来让学生参与进来，并提高教师的效率，以改善学习结果。这个项目的主要目标是开发一个灵活的、用户友好的、动手操作的机器人工具包，以及相关的课程和对教师的支持，这将使学生参与学习数学内容，与核心课程保持一致，并显著提高学生的成绩。这种基于研究的课堂工具包的商业化将使学区能够在其数学教学中采用主动学习。最终，这将促进NSF通过科学创新促进国家繁荣的使命，通过改善全美学生的数学准备，并为他们参与推动科学和技术进步的职业做好准备。这项工作的核心贡献包括一个灵活的硬件工具包，使其能够在核心基础课程和更传统的Maker活动中进行主动学习，以及一套应用程序，允许学生使用该工具包学习特定的数学内容，同时还提供通过通用编程应用程序学习计算思维的选项。为了实现这一目标，该团队采用了经过验证的设计流程，在该流程中，硬件、软件和课程同时设计为与学员目标保持一致，并在课堂研究中进行评估，并反复改进。该套件将结合常规卡扣式电子套件的易用性和简单性与可编程微控制器的灵活性。为这个项目开发的应用程序将建立在机器人编程的新的基于数学的范例上。这些面向数学的应用程序将消除小学教师和学生在使用电子工具包进行数学教学时编程技能的障碍。同时，编程应用程序将支持对制造和计算思维的开放式探索。该项目的另一个贡献是对硬件系统和补充数学课程进行测试和分析。形成性评估将有助于探索和理解学习数学的新机制，对该计划的有效性的评估将有助于表征对学生数学成绩和数学态度的影响。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

项目成果

Leveraging tangible interfaces in primary school math: Pilot testing of the Owlet math program

在小学数学中利用有形界面：Owlet 数学程序的试点测试

• DOI: 10.1016/j.ijcci.2020.100222
• 发表时间: 2021
• 期刊: International Journal of Child-Computer Interaction
• 作者: Zito, Lauren;Cross, Jennifer L.;Brewer, Bambi;Speer, Samantha;Tasota, Michael;Hamner, Emily;Johnson, Molly;Lauwers, Tom;Nourbakhsh, Illah
• 通讯作者: Nourbakhsh, Illah