Going beyond technical education to help students flourish

Key points:

Educators often focus on how well robotics in education can prepare students for careers in STEM fields. And that’s both true and important. Robotics is an engaging way to kickstart student interest in technical fields and, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, STEM jobs are projected to grow three-and-half times faster than non-STEM jobs.

The lessons learned in the robotics classroom, however, are applicable to any job and life in general. Students learn persistence and resilience, teamwork and collaboration, and problem-solving skills. We’ve seen students in our classes find their own voices and learn to advocate for themselves. Robotics is also a great vehicle for cross curricular experiences that bring the concepts students learn in other classes to life by putting them to use in practical situations.

It’s also true that while leading a programming class can feel intimidating for teachers with little technical background, robotics projects can be successfully facilitated by any teacher and students can even lead each other with the correct resources. At the School for the Talented and Gifted in Pleasant Grove, we teach a variety of robotics and programming courses despite the fact that only one of us had prior experience in related areas.

Here’s how we use robotics to engage students, teach a variety of soft and technical skills, and not lose all our time to lesson planning.

Rooted in competition

Two or three years ago, we shifted the focus of our classrooms from helping students learn all the basics of engineering to competition. When we learn about gear ratios, for example, we might do it by having students compete to win a tug of war competition or robotic sumo wrestling match. Competition is great for engaging students and naturally encourages collaboration within teams. Perhaps most importantly, it gives students a sense of pride in the work they do in our classrooms.

It also forces our students to develop resilience and to become contrarian thinkers. As they try new ideas and fail, and try again with a little more information, they are learning to stick with a challenge even when they seem to be making little progress, and they begin thinking critically about what they might try next and the different ways it might also fail.

Project-based lessons

Because robotics lessons are so often project based, particularly when they are rooted in competition or gamified, they tend to bring in concepts and ideas from disparate fields or even students’ own life experiences. They learn to apply physics in our robotics classes when they use what they have learned about balanced and unbalanced forces to their sumo robot designs. When they are calculating angles to figure out the optimal path for their robot, they are using the math they have recently learned in the real world, answering for themselves the age-old question of math students: “When are we ever going to use this?”

Every day in our robotics classes, we are reinforcing students’ learning from across the curriculum in deeply practical ways.

Students also learn processes that can be applied widely beyond robotics simply by managing their own projects. The projects we use come with guides students follow through each step of a project, including creating an initial design, gathering feedback on it, adding accessibility features, creating a final design, and then presenting their finished products and results to their peers.

We’ve also found that improving rigor for students with a little more technical knowledge is easy with the right program. We have many students who are eager to learn about programming and come to our class with some knowledge of Scratch, for example, and it’s easy for us to adapt projects to ensure they are challenging for technologically precocious students while remaining accessible to those who are just beginning their coding journey.

Simplified planning

As the only programming teachers in our school, we were worried about planning time. One of us teaches five different programming courses and the other had a limited background in programming. We have one hour of planning to prepare for all these classes, so we are grateful to have a supplemental resource that provides everything we need to get started. We use CoderZ because it lines up well with our competitive, multi-curricular, and project-based approach to programming.

It’s so easy to implement that teachers with no background can jump right into teaching, and students can even take over and lead their peers.

It’s such a joy to see the excitement in our students’ faces as they begin digging into each new project, but it’s no match for the satisfaction of watching their confidence grow as their technical and social skills blossom throughout the year.