Retaining Female Students in a Robotics Program

As we all know, the United States is short of women engineers in the work place. Many female students lose interest in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) at an early age. How to encourage and retain female students’ interest in STEM is a challenge faced by many educators. The paper describes our collaboration (Wentworth Institute of Technology (WIT)) with an allgirl high school to setup a robotics workshop. The high school administration is interested in bringing engineering and technology as a new component to their curriculum. From our side, we constantly seek outreach opportunities to prompt STEM and attract more girls into the STEM fields. After meeting and discussion with the high school administration, a robotics workshop was developed. The workshop was a year-long program that served as an extra curriculum activity for the girls. The program was launched in Fall 2014, starting with seven girls. By the end of the first year, there were only two students remained in the program. It was thus noticed that retention was a big problem. To increase retention rate, several changes were made in the second year when the workshop was offered, including for example, making the equipment available onsite at the high school, training a science teacher from the high school, providing more detailed step-by-step instructions, designing more individual (instead of integrated) tasks to help students understand the basic concepts, and to simply practice more. Results show that these modifications greatly improve students’ learning experience since an average of six to seven girls participated throughout the entire workshop in the second year. This paper summarizes our work and experience in setting up a robotic program at an all-girl high school during the past two years. Details about curriculum development, adjustment, and modifications for improving retention rate are described. Introduction & Background Nowadays, more and more scientists, engineers and innovators are needed to succeed in the global competitive economy environment. As a result, this requires quality science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education. Unfortunately, few American students pursue education and training in the STEM fields. Further, there is an inadequate pipeline of teachers who skilled in these subjects. After noticing this challenge, the whole STEM society has made great efforts to increase STEM-related activities, which have the potential to promote collaborative learning and inquiry as well as to contribute to the development of the 21 century skills. The US government also realized the shortage of STEM workforces. It initiated the “Educate to Innovate” program to increase student participation in all STEM-related activities. The ultimate objective of these activities is to encourage more students to choose an education in the STEM fields and pursue a STEM-related career in the future. Extra after-school curriculum programs have been reported to be an efficient way to prompt STEM education. To name a few, these programs may include science club, visits to museums & natural settings, robotics, science fairs, Science Olympiads, and Mathematics Olympiads. Robotics has been widely adopted as an integrated and efficient tool to prompt STEM, since the nature of the robotics science is both multi-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary covering subjects such as Computer Science, Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. Another feature that makes Robotics suitable for the mission is that it provides a platform for students to learn, act/react, and practice. Research shows that youth participation in the robotics activities increases their STEM knowledge, their perceived problem solving skills, and their interest and confidence in engineering careers. Getting more students involved in the STEM education is already a challenge. Attracting more female students into the STEM fields can be even harder. Many institutions and organizations have realized this challenge and provided various activities to promote female students into the STEM fields. In addition, different strategies were developed to recruit and retain students in the STEM education. Creating quality, attractive STEM programs and using peer influence to motivate high school girls into the STEM field appears to be effective ways to retain female students in STEM. AKL et. al. demonstrated that ambassador and mentoring programs build up the student-to-student relationship. This helps female students to feel the support from others and thus decide to remain in the STEM program. Mosatche et. al reported that facilitators play a critical role in participants’ engagement, achievement, and retention in the STEM related programs. In other words, training the educators helps to encourage more students into the STEM field. Lauwers et. al. introduced a strategy that both speeds uptake in the community and improves the chances of the project creating an educational successful tool. This paper describes our experience along this line to attract high-school girls into the STEM fields. The high school collaborating with us is an all-girl high school in the Boston city. In order to meet the requirement of an engineering and technology program expected from the high school, the authors and the high school administration setup a year-long robotics program. This program started in Fall 2014 and lasted for two years. Many adjustment, modifications, and improvement were made during the two-year process. Two positive outcomes were first described here. First, a new robotics club was formed at the high school. Second, one female student in the high school enrolled in the school of engineering and technology at WIT. The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 describes several key elements of the workshop series including hardware platform, software programming languages, format of the workshop, and detailed lesson plans. During the first-year offering, several issues and challenges were encountered and these are discussed in Section 3. Based on experience and lessons learnt during the first-year offering, significant modifications were made during the second year, as presented in Section 4, which result in improved retention rate. Section 5 shows students’ response to our survey. The survey results also confirm students’ interests in the workshop and the selected topics. Finally, section 6 concludes the paper, summarizing our experience and knowledge gained through offering the robotics workshop. Objective, Curriculum Development, and Format The objective of the workshop is to make students be exposed to the exciting area of robotics and thus motivate them to pursue a STEM-related major later on. As a starting point, we aimed at introducing the fundamentals of robotics science and the basic components of a robotics system, including hardware, software, programming, sensors, and control. Students gained intensive experience working with the robots. The next step would be preparing the students to participate in the FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC) competition, targeting towards students in grades 6 ~ 12. Since the students’ ability to independently design, program, test, and debug needs to be trained, decision was made to make the workshop a year-long program, providing the students with more exercises and hands-on time. The workshop was offered as an extra curriculum activity. Hardware: LEGO MINDSTORM NXT/EV3 has been widely used as a robotics outreach platform for high/middle school students. Due to its portability, versatility, low-cost, and easy maintenance, the LEGO MINDSTORM EV3 was selected as the robotics platform for the workshop. It allowed the students to explore engineering concepts through the use of motors, sensors, and programming in a team-driven environment. It also allowed the students to quickly design and create robots of various functions. The Lego EV3 Kits were purchased using the first author’s professorship fund provided by Wentworth Institute of Technology (WIT). Software: Among many different software, ROBOTC, developed by Carnegie Mellon University, was chosen. ROBOTC provides different ways to program the controller, i.e., graphic-based, natural-language-based, and text-based. The graphic-based programming is direct and easy for students to understand and start programming quicly. The natural-language-based programming is the “transition” from the graphic-based to the text-based programming. The textbased programming is suitable for relatively more complicated design and implementation tasks. Format: Based on the availability of both parties, a bi-weekly workshop was setup: every other Thursday from 3:30-5:00PM. The location was first selected to be one of the labs at the WIT due to several reasons. Firstly, it was easier for the authors to manage the equipment. Secondly, it was feasible for the authors to recruit college students to help the high-school girls during the workshop. These helpers are mostly members of the Society of Women Engineers (SWE) club at WIT. Some of them were paid through work study program if they were qualified, the rest of them were volunteers. These female college students can act as the role models for the highschool girls. Thirdly, this would provide the high-school students an opportunity to work in a college lab and have an early touch on the college environment, thus gaining more confidence in pursuing a STEM-related college education in the future. The high school assigned a science teacher as a chaperon to drive the students to WIT. Due to the limited transportation, there are seven girls registered for the workshop. This high school teacher continued to participate in the second year to work as the leader to help the students. Lesson Plan: The following lesson plan was carefully designed for the year-long robotics workshop. Table 1 lists the lesson plans for both Year 1 and Year 2. As can be seen, many mo