1. A BERO CLF Themed Nifty Middle School Module
- Author
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Elizabeth Quigley, Sallie Petty, Rachel Hart, and Ankur Chattopadhyay
- Subjects
Dance ,Computer science ,business.industry ,05 social sciences ,050301 education ,Information technology ,020207 software engineering ,Robotics ,02 engineering and technology ,Experiential learning ,Outreach ,ComputingMilieux_COMPUTERSANDEDUCATION ,0202 electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering ,Mathematics education ,Robot ,Artificial intelligence ,business ,0503 education ,Curriculum ,Lesson plan - Abstract
Information Technology (IT) computing based curriculum is still a relatively new addition to the standard K-12 educational framework, especially at the middle school level. Many middle schools have not yet implemented tech curriculum to prepare students for their almost inevitable interactions with computers in the workplace, and give them a chance to explore technology careers at an early age. The work presented in this paper is a research case study conducted in the form of building a unique cell-bot learning framework (CLF) themed educational module and its usage in an effort to contribute towards the middle school IT computing curriculum. Existing literature on robotics based tech curriculum for young children indicate that there have been multiple instances of curriculum design and development work at the K-12 level, involving robotic kits like LEGO Mind-storm, Bee-bots, Sphero robots. However, to our knowledge, the BERO robotic device has never been used for producing robotic technology curriculum at the middle school level. In this paper, we propose a nifty workshop module, which utilizes the unique CLF themed BERO. Our lesson plan is specifically designed for introducing mobile robotics and functional programming to middle school youth using music, thereby providing a fun and interactive experience in tech computing education. We expose our young workshop participants to the tech skills of programming a BERO and making it dance to music using a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. The experiential learning process is aided by the use of an innovative visual aid program tool, which has been designed and developed by us. This paper describes our creative BERO middle school workshop module, which has been successfully implemented to conduct several hands-on workshop sessions for middle school students, as part of our Google IgniteCS outreach program. Our paper also presents the survey data collected from our workshop participants in an effort to evaluate our nifty CLF theme based experiential learning model. Our survey results are promising, and indicate the potential of our nifty module to teach introductory functional coding and to generate interest in robotic programming, thereby acting as a prospective educational interface for recruiting future tech students, leading to IT careers.
- Published
- 2018
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