Resources for Robot Competition Success: Assessing Math Use in Grade-School-Level Engineering Design

This is an exploratory study of the use of math in the design solutions of a middle and elementary school level robot competition. Competition scores were used as measures of engineering design success. Sixteen teams were interviewed on the day of the competition to assess their use of math in their design solutions. Four of those teams were followed additionally prior to and after the competition using survey instruments measuring math use in robot transfer problems and attitudes toward robots and math. These measures assessed potential impacts beyond competition success. Only one quarter of the teams used math explicitly in their design solutions. The use of math was found to have a highly variable relationship with design success, with the highest and very low scoring teams in the competition having used math. However, both successful and unsuccessful cases of teams that used math did exhibit improved use of math on the transfer test. Further, in the case of an unsuccessful math-using team, the students’ did have more positive interest in math and in robots as well as more positive views about the value of math for robots after the experience of preparing for and participating in the competition. Introduction and Background As robots have become cheaper over the past two decades, they have increasingly become an accessible way for K-12 students to learn about engineering design. Simple robots provide a concrete form for younger students to explore issues related to structures, mechanisms, and behaviors through the design of the robots using building blocks, motors, sensors, and programmable bricks. Increasingly a common context for learning with robots has been in robot competitions. A primary goal of these competitions is to build students’ interests in engineering, but also their skills in engineering as well. Especially in robot competition settings that aren’t specifically tied to a formal course, the theory is that students will be motivated to test and learn about more general ideas by building a robot to successfully perform a specific task. But prior research in such settings has often relied on self-reports by students and coaches only after the experience has concluded to assess what gains in skills and content as well as what changes in interest and attitudes resulted from participation. 6 This leaves open many questions about what is the substance of such learning, what is the relationship between success in the competition and changes in learning or attitudes, and what sorts of approaches by participants may affect this relationship. Prior research on a high school robot competition identified a teams’ use of mathematics in their solution process as a predictor of competition success. This aligns well with undergraduate level, graduate level, and authentic engineering design in which mathematics is a key element. It not as clear whether math use in design by elementary and middle school students would be similarly productive. By analyzing the design solutions of competition participants in detail, understanding what opportunities to use math in their design solutions were available, and investigating the types of design solutions that were more successful in the competition, we might better understand the process by which robotics can indeed lead to positive outcomes. P ge 22246.2 The Robot Competition Every year, thousands of adults around the world serve as coaches and mentors for teams of elementary and middle school students in increasingly popular robotics competitions such as FIRST® LEGO® League (FLL). Typical grade-school-level competitions like FLL involve the building and programming of small robots to solve a specific design challenge using robot platforms such as the LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT. A challenge usually consists of a series of missions that involve pushing, retrieving, picking up, and placing objects. Each mission is designated a point value and the object is to earn as many points as possible in a limited time, usually a few minutes. The challenges vary from competition to competition and change every year, but teams are generally given months to design their solutions. The focus of the present study was a small, local-level robot competition that was modeled after a typical robotics competition. This competition, called “May Madness”, was sponsored by a nationally recognized robotics education organization that also hosts the annual state FLL championship. This robot challenge was called “Botball Hybrid II”, and like FLL competitions, it was to be completed with LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT robots and was geared toward elementary and middle school age students. Figure 1: Botball Hybrid II Robot Competition Challenge Game Board P ge 22246.3 Although not quite as complex as typical FLL challenges in terms of the number of missions or the variety of objects on the board, the Botball Hybrid II challenge includes a number of elements that require sophisticated solutions (see Figure 1). Two teams occupy the board at the same time, a black team and a white team. Each team can have one robot on the board at a time and the teams start at opposite ends of the board. The object is to get the most points possible in a 90-second round. Points are obtained by collecting ping-pong balls and toilet paper tubes of the team’s color and also common nests and foam balls. Knocking the ping-pong balls loose gets some points, but the most points are obtained by bringing the objects back to a team’s end zone. Even more points are obtained by lifting the objects into the gutters on the side of the table. Research Questions and Hypotheses The focus of the present study was to investigate ways that incorporating math in their competition design solutions may have deepened students’ experiences with robots. To this end, this study had the following research questions: 1. Are there opportunities to use math in this typical grade-school-level robot competition challenge? 2. Does using math have any impact on a team’s competition success? 3. Are there benefits to using math in any other sense, such as in changes in robot problem solving or attitudes about robots? K-12 students are often not fluent in mathematics and so using math in their design process may hinder their design success. Further, the nature of the competition tasks may not reward math use. We hypothesize that such barriers to math use do indeed exist and that they contribute to many teams choosing not to use math in their solutions. However, we hypothesize also that teams choosing to use math in spite of these barriers can exhibit positive benefits from doing so, both in terms of design performance in the competition challenge itself, but also in terms of learning and more positive attitudes about robots.