Educational results of the Personal Exploration Rover museum exhibit

technology, curriculum and evaluation techniques for robotic educational use in formal and informal (after-school, out-ofschool) learning environments. Our specific aim for this phase of the project is to create and evaluate human-robot interactions that educate members of the general public in an informal learning environment, specifically museums. Our educational goals are to further an appreciation and understanding of NASA's Mars Exploration Rovers (MERs), to illustrate the role of robotic rovers in scientific exploration, and to provide hands-on learning experiences that demonstrate robot autonomy. We have designed a new robot, the Personal Exploration Rover (PER) and the related interactive components of a museum exhibit to achieve these goals. Here we describe the exhibits developed and the formal evaluation results of the exhibits ' educational impact and efficacy. These results suggest techniques by which learning can be measured and used as an indicator of successful human-robot interaction

The Design of a Highly Reliable Robot for Unmediated Museum Interaction *

Abstract *- Installation of a robot system in a publicly accessible technical museum poses nontrivial problems along three axes. First, the robot must be reliable, both by failing rarely in spite of continuous, daily use and by allowing museum staff to easily return the robot to service. Second, the robot must perform without the need for staff intervention, from system autonomy to energetics enabling full-day operation without battery replacement. Third, the user-end interaction software must be self-explanatory as well as instructional and engaging in order to effectively communicate the learning goals of the exhibit. In this paper we describe the design of such a robot system and share early results regarding its successful deployment at five museums across the United States

The educational impact of the Robotic Autonomy Mobile Robotics Course

Robotic Autonomy is a seven-week, hands-on introduction to robotics designed for high school students. The course presents a broad survey of robotics, beginning with mechanism and electronics and ending with robot behavior, navigation and remote teleoperation. During the summer of 2002, Robotic Autonomy was taught to thirty students at Carnegie Mellon West in cooperation with NASA/Ames (Moffett Field, CA). The educational robot and curriculum used in the course were designed so that the students would be able to achieve high levels of robot competency during class and would be able to keep the robots after completing the class, enabling continued exploration at home. In conjunction with course design, the authors at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute and at the University of Pittsburgh's Learning Research and Discovery Center planned a methodology for evaluating the educational efficacy of Robotic Autonomy. This article describes the educational analysis methodology and the statistically significant results of our analysis, demonstrating the positive impact of Robotic Autonomy on student learning, well beyond the boundaries of specific technical concepts in robotics

CSbots: A case study in introducing educational technology to a classroom setting

We present CSbots, an ongoing project to use robots as educational tools in the Introduction to Computer Science (CS1) course. Enrollments in Computer Science have dropped significantly, and part of the blame rests on an introductory course that has not kept pace with the progress of computational technology. We aim to use robotics to motivate students, provide a sense of relevance to the course work, and improve learning.</p

Robot Diaries: Broadening Participation in the Computer Science Pipeline through Social Technical Exploration

In this paper we describe the results of a series of robotics workshops for secondary school girls. Specifically we show that, in a new pilot program, a group of eight girls was engaged by the workshop and gained technical knowledge over the course of a three-month workshop. The Robot Diaries program is unique in that it creates a social narrative approach to robotics education. The robotic technology becomes a tool for expression and communication rather than the sole focus of the workshop