SBIR-STTR Award

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop ways to leverage the teaching power of educational robotics to promote the learning of central big ideas in algebra. With its strong appeal and rich intellectual content, educational robotics has an established culture and following - but one that sits outside the educational mainstream. Considered a 'technology' activity, robotics is pursued more often in after school clubs and other informal settings. While a wide variety of young people are drawn to robotics, those who stay with it tend to be strongly technologically inclined. New technologies and curriculum materials can disrupt this state of affairs by making robotics more accessible and rewarding, and by unlocking its potential to yield important and measurable learning outcomes that align with national mathematics education standards. The proposed research focuses on innovations to improve the quality of educational robotics technologies as creative tools and as hybrid physical/virtual manipulatives that make core algebra ideas transparent, interactive, and empowering. Design research methods will be used to begin to chart pathways by which context-bound competence within the robotics learning environment can transfer to success in school algebra. Educators and policymakers understand that algebra is powerful that it is a gateway to academic and career success. But most young people have yet to taste the power of algebra. A successful project outcome will lead to products that enable many thousands of young people to master fundamental algebraic concepts and turn them to their own constructive purposes, thereby experiencing algebra's creative empowerment and its connection to technology and digital media. The project outcomes will impact educational robotics by increasing its benefits and expanding its audience, gaining a stronger presence in school settings while also attracting and retaining a broader range of participants in informal settings. This work advances urgently needed alignment between technological fluency and school mathematics and science

This Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) Phase II project uses an iterative design research method to investigate the technical and curricular innovations need to maximize the algebra learning value of educational robotics. The research objectives of this project address: 1) software tools to make core algebra concepts accessible and useful in a robotics context; 2) activity design; 3) curricular architecture; and 4) evaluation, including summative evaluation of learning outcomes. If successful, this SBIR Phase II project will lead to products enabling over a million young people to gain confidence and conceptual grounding in algebra. The project will help to break down the artificial and detrimental wall between school mathematics and the tools and concepts that underlie the information economy. Finally, this research will demonstrate advances in the structure of learning environments, showing how rigorous learning can be more portable, more individualized, and more interwoven with creativity and play. "This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5)."