SBIR-STTR Award

This project intends to design and develop a programmable electronics and robotics kit that catalyzes the learning of computational thinking, engineering design, and making at a price point that will be affordable for large numbers of elementary school classrooms throughout the nation. Such an educational robotics kit benefits society by positively influencing science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education and, thereby, encouraging students from diverse backgrounds to enter the technology innovation workplace, spurring innovation and entrepreneurism in the nation. This project aims to create an authentic, affordable STEM curricular tool by combining low-cost technologies already in the marketplace, but in a novel manner. These technologies include wireless communications systems now available on low-cost touch tablets, as well as powerful, inexpensive microprocessors that enable small, custom hardware kits to communicate with such tablets. By combining the sensing of environmental values such as light and sound levels with motors, lights and other output expressions, this kit will provide a chance for students to think at the systems level. They will create interactive sculptural robots and connect systems thinking to programming, engineering, and design, all of which are lifelong skills for the STEM-focused future. This project combines wireless communication, tablets, and embedded microcontroller technologies to converge on an interactive system for specifying the behavior of a responsive, environmental-sensing robot and to then lock the resulting behavior onboard the microcontroller, creating a programmable, responsive robot system for education at the lowest cost possible. Robot-to-robot communication is effected using mesh networking, enabling sensor sharing and synchronization of action across robots in a classroom. A newly designed drag-and-drop programming interface on the tablet screen demonstrates the basic concepts of feedback control systems and directly programs the embedded microprocessor. Uploading of the feedback control system specification directly to the microprocessor, in turn, enables autonomous operation of the robot without the need for a dedicated programming tablet at all times. This project makes use of participatory design, interaction design, hardware architecture, firmware programming, and supply chain analysis to arrive at a usable system that can be produced in large quantities as appropriate for national and international demand. The participatory design portion of this work will include direct, collaborative pilots deployed in local schools; professional development opportunities for participating teachers; and formative evaluations of hands-on robotic activities, with prototypes, in classrooms. This project will lead directly to the commercialization of a bridge product that combines features of the final educational robotics kit with a working tablet app suitable for immediate use in elementary school classrooms.

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.