The Effectiveness of Using Robotics for Career Technology Education in a Middle School STE(A)M Course

Using robotics in education allows students to become familiar with multiple topics in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). With the use of robotic educational tools in the 8th – 12th grade classrooms, such as Sphero, Anki Cozmo, and Lego Mindstorms, few devices allow students to build the robots’ electrical circuits along with constructing and programming. By incorporating electronics into these educational tools, students can learn another fundamental discipline of robotics. For this research, we introduce the Parallax ActivityBot 3600 to the Linus Pauling Middle School career technology education (CTE) course to see if the device promotes STEM. The ActivityBot 3600 incorporates robotics, electronics, computer science, and mathematics into constructing and using the device. Students use the tutorials given online to assemble the robot and to program it with a block-based coding language called BlocklyProp with an option to use the text-based C language. The main idea is to determine the effectiveness of this tool for CTE courses and how it can change students’ interest, enjoyment, confidence, knowledge, and/or motivation to pursue a degree or career in STEM. For this research, we surveyed 8 grade middle school students before and after using the device to see how their opinions and knowledge in STEM changed. From the results, we find that students’ confidence in three of the four topics surveyed increased after using the ActivityBot 3600.