Robotics: Enhancing Pre-College Mathematics Learning with Real-world Examples

Seventeen ninth grade students worked in teams to build low cost robots, program them, and use them to draw various geometric shapes on a canvas of 6’ x 6’, all during a regular semester long course. The course was designed to enhance their interest in engineering and math, while providing a social context of empowerment, competition and cooperation. This paper will document our past and planned efforts to integrate robotics into high school math curriculum. We are driven by two fundamental objectives: (1) Build low cost robots that can be purchased or built incrementally to manage budgetary restrictions. These robots should be reliable, robust, and most important of all, be customizable for the specific needs of the teacher and the student teams; and (2) adapt the approach of “Understanding by Design” by Wiggins and McTighe in integrating robots into math lessons. They recommend a three-stage process: define objectives; determine assessments, and develop tasks (in our case, robotics based exercises). For the first objective, we will provide details our on-going work on building low cost robots that every K-12 school can afford. It is based on open source principles, making it easy to learn from the community, and to innovate and contribute back to the community. New ideas and lessons will evolve that can provide a small remuneration to the inventors, while as a larger community we will all make progress in educating our next generation in math and engineering principles. There is potential for many exciting extensions. For the second objective, we have used “Algebra 2: Common Core” by Charles et al., as the starting point to seek this mapping. This book fully aligns with the Common Core State Standards. Further, Dr. Wiggins is a co-author of this book, thus ensuring that this book is faithful to the Understanding by Design (UbD) philosophy. This paper in its final version will present our approaches fully. We seek the feedback of the reader to improve them. We have made available all our course assets (robot design, Apps, code, and presentation videos) at a university website. We visualize this as a community resource that other researchers and educators can leverage to improve and adopt; we hope they will share their lessons and tools with the larger community.