Under-Represented Populations Stand-Alone Report 3 (Progress)

Project A Academy A Evaluation

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FINDINGS (cont'd)

Academy Substance

The array of activities that participants named as being among their favorite was diverse, as shown in Table 7, which allows for multiple responses.

Other favorite activities mentioned by one student included: designing; making new friends; work in pairs instead of larger groups; painting the mouse; finishing robots; using tools with the mouse; seeing others' robots; working with sensors; building Smart House. The activities that students named as their favorites appeared to be somewhat influenced by their status as a novice or as previously experienced with robotics, with beginners more enamored of building No differences were apparent as a function of age/grade or gender.

Both the directional challenges and the YY project, particularly the fact that students could select their own robots to build, were popular among students. Students could recount many of the specific programming problems that they had been given to solve:

I liked the flipper, when the car flips, you can program it to reverse and keep flipping. And the one that it would start in one area of the room then go into the hallway and then turn. And like we wanted it to turn and go down the hallway and into the other door...I like that one too... they gave us different things we could do like spin in the circle and me and my partner picked the one that goes out the door and walked down the hall (7^th grade beginner girl)

The challenges on the floor, the black and white challenges... (7^th grade intermediate boy)

One 7^th grade intermediate girl characterized the directional challenges as "problemsolving":

One of the favorite things was when we were solving this problem when it was supposed to beep on the lights and the lights were supposed to turn-on on black. And my second favorite thing was building the um, the disc shooter.

Although comparatively not as captivating as the hands-on activities, several students valued the visit to the XX lab, associating it overtly or implicitly with increased learning, and in the case of the second quote below, demonstrating the beginning cultivation of the language of robotics:

And wait I got one more [favorite thing], going to the lab, when we saw the soccer dogs and the wheel chair... I really didn't know that robots were that important until we went to the lab (7^th grade intermediate girl)

And also I liked going downstairs to the XX lab to see how real robots work. It was something like ours but much much better. They had different touch sensors, they used like square batteries not the regular batteries like Duracell. They use square batteries to program these robots and make sure what the robots see when they are doing these things. And they uh, uh they use different kind of tools and many other uses to work their robots, like we don't use that, we use different uses. Cause their robots are activated better than ours so we, so when we went downstairs we seen that if we want to work with robots we'll know, since we've been here, we'll know half of what to do. (7^th grade beginner girl)

In some instances, students framed the things they liked about the academy in ways consonant with the core objectives of Project A, but their language only obliquely referenced these objectives. For example, in the above statement, the 7^th grade girl used "tools" and the notion of "activation," but invoked "uses" several times to cover concepts she had not yet accessed. In another example, invention, innovation, and design were key to two beginner girls' experiences but the references they made were to the more colloquial "combining ideas" and "trying to get it to do something":

When we get the chance to actually build something that we want to build like we've been given assignment to do stuff and build stuff...like, cause what we did was we had an Inventorbot and it has legs but it doesn't walk, because the legs are really heavy and he'll fall forward so what we did was we combined two with like this kind of wheel right here with the track and we put our robot on top of that and so it rolls with that and also does the other stuff that the Inventorbot does, so it's like combining ideas. (7^th grade beginner girl)

When I built the robot myself and tried to get it to walk cause it was the kind of robot that you can't get it to walk or ride or something (7^th grade beginner girl)

Students created new language to refer to particular tasks they had done. For example, for one 8^th grade girl "the zig zag" was, as translated for affirmation by the interviewer, "programming it to go back and forth." Programming was also implicit but absent in one 7^th grade girl's depiction of her favorite academy activity as "making robots write on the ground."

Consistent with findings from the 2001 evaluation, challenge and frustration were intertwined thematically. In talking about challenge and frustration, students often pointed to situations with objectively similar characteristics, but described the subjective experience as more or less challenging or frustrating-that is, what for one student was a welcome challenge, was a frustrating irritation for another. For most academy participants, challenge was positive and was associated with the process of "testing" things out, including one's own skills, as well as engaging in "hard" tasks:

[It was] challenging but fun [Interviewer: Good challenging or bad challenging?] Good, test my skills (7^th grade intermediate boy)

Building the disc shooter [was my favorite] because it's like more competitive and mind breeding. That it's real hard for you to build... [Interviewer: What do you mean by that?] I mean it's challenging, it's something that you want to do, get done and you put a lot of effort into it. (9th grade intermediate boy)

"Complication" was a theme that positively associated with "challenge," and for which frustration loomed as a possibility. Time and its wastage were often invoked when students described having dealt with frustration. In addition, academy activities could prompt students to reflect consciously on their own frustration, both their reactions and the ramifications and lessons inherent in these reactions:

I didn't think I'd be building such big robots, more complicated ones. I thought it would be building simple robots, like a wall-hugging mouse, but instead I'm building a whole bunch of different things. Got to use your brain [Interviewer: Is that a good thing?] Yes, sometimes I get frustrated with the robots because I sometimes put the wrong part on it. It's either too small or too big and I have to take some time to re-do it. [Interviewer: How did that go?] I got upset but I didn't have to take the whole thing apart. <Person's name> gave me a better way to take it apart so Ididn't have to take the whole thing apart...when I got frustrated I would make another mistake. (7^th grade intermediate girl)

[I told my family about] the mouse and building things and like some stuff you have to do over. It's like you should have thought about it and it's like a waste of time when you have to take apart and do something else. [Interviewer: If you'd thought about it?] It would have worked the first time...but that's OK because you can learn from your mistakes (8^th grade beginner girl)

Students with some prior robotics experience tended to use more sophisticated language to describe programming in comparison to novice students. Among the activities students engaged in during the academy, programming could most strongly spark the issues associated with frustration and challenge. Appealing in its openendedness and in its capacity to support personal creativity, programming was also characterized as "hard" and as requiring forethought to avoid "messing up":

The programming is hard cause you've got to think about, like if one motor is on and one motor is off, and some of the axles were mixed up so we had to go back and go through it and you saw what it looks like...sometimes just the littlest mistakes can mess up the whole thing! [Interviewer: What were you feeling then?] It was fun (7^th grade intermediate girl)

It was kind of aggravating because our robot kept on messing up and breaking and we had to start allover again. [Interviewer: What do you mean breaking?] Falling apart and we kept on having to program it over and doing other stuff to it. [Interviewer: Was that OK or did it bother you?] It was half and half, like you program it and you liked the program and then it wouldn't work so you had to find out another one (8^th grade beginner girl)

For some, mistakes and "messing up" was understood in terms of "testing" both explicitly and implicitly:

Programming, testing new things. (7^th grade intermediate boy)

Being able to program them and see how different are the moves that they do and then about the different sensors (8^th grade beginner girl)

For several students programming was especially appealing because it afforded opportunity to be creative in selecting their own set of commands:

[My favorite was] working with programs. It was my first time working with the laptop. I like getting to program what I want. Some other things when you build it, it only does that one thing but this one can do a variety (8^th grade intermediate boy)

My mom was like, 'How did the day go?' And I was like mostly I go through the steps like what we do in the morning and what at the end of the day...[I describe for her] my work and what I did and how you got to program it and work with the computer. And like you are telling the computer you're telling the computer what to do and different stuff like that... [I liked] the one that it would start in one area of the room then go into the hallway and then turn and like we wanted it to turn and go down the hallway into the other door. (7^th grade beginner girl)

Generally students seemed to associate the sensors with programming:

It taught me a little bit more, like how to sue the sensors and do more programming... repeat and the yes and the no (8^th grade intermediate girl)

The majority (56%) of students had no least favorite aspect of the AA Academy. Not surprisingly given the appeal of challenging tasks, nearly a fifth of students least liked aspects of the session that were deemed "too easy" ("going back to the basics"/ "refresher talk") or tedious ("finding the pieces"). Overall, another fifth of the students least liked frustrating aspects of the session, such as working with small pieces, robots falling apart, and wiring that does not work.

Academy participants seldom spontaneously mentioned their interactions with project staff, including graduate student and high school assistors, and students were not directly asked about this. In two cases, however, both involving female participants, assistors were mentioned. One girl asked a graduate student facilitator questions about the capacities of the XX lab robots she had seen. Another girl was advised by a high school assistor how to correct a building problem without having to take the entire robot apart. This intercession, according to the student, reduced her feeling of frustration, which she saw had prompted her to make even more mistakes.

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