Robots Will Program Our Lives — Who Will Program The Robots?

As we wrap up Robotics Week, I’ve found myself thinking about the nearly imperceptible ways that robots show up in our lives, well beyond the virtual assistants we have sitting on our kitchen counter or barking out directions from the GPS on our phones.

Robotics, the engineering field that enables their creation and use, is already ubiquitous in the 21st century. A PWC report found that by next year, 77 percent of jobs will require some degree of technological skills. And while futurists are racing to predict which job will be the last one humans do themselves, there’s no question that, for the foreseeable future, coding those robots will be in demand.  Nonetheless, robotics is rare in PK-12 education, and it is primarily affluent, urban and white boys who get to play.

The teachers who do teach robotics often see students use what they learn to build practical skills in adjacent fields, including computer programming and mechanical engineering.

“It’s a more engaging way to learn elementary physics concepts,” said fifth-grade teacher Kayla Heimann, who uses robotics kits in her math and science classes at Eastern Elementary in Lexington, Ohio, is a part of my organization’s prestigious national Teacher Forum. “It provides a hands-on, and most importantly, fun way to learn.”

This excitement applies to older students, too. Sylvia Wood, who teaches high-school computer science and robotics at Rouse High School in Leander, Texas, and is also a member of the Teacher Forum, finds that students are more engaged in the learning process when they get to see the material in action in projects they’ve directly worked on.

“I’ve had students get so excited about robotics that they started trying to learn STEM-related materials in class and out on their own,” she said.

This is key. Studies have shown that students achieve higher grades, by as much as 70% in math and 40% in science, when they’re able to do hands-on activities related to those subjects.

As with all good, relevant, student-centered learning, teaching robotics can be an opportunity to practice lifelong skills.  Daniel Garrison, a Teacher Forum member who teaches at Woodrow Wilson High School STEM Academy in Dallas, Texas, and coach of their robotics team “The Robocats,” found that students learn invaluable skills like teamwork, persistence, and abstraction, which pay off long after they graduate from school.

Unfortunately, robotics curricula are available to too few students. According to Dr. Carol Fletcher, Deputy Director of the STEM Center at the University of Texas at Austin’s College of Education, a big reason for this is cost.

 “A class set of enough robots to ensure that all students have substantive experiences will typically exceed thousands of dollars per teacher, which is more than the entire instructional budget for most teachers,” she said.

This also means that robotics courses are often not inclusive. Robotics classes become extra-curricular activities and are primarily the domain of those with extra time and extra income. Making it an after-school activity also makes it opt-in and thus subject to cultural and social pressure, acting as a barrier to wide groups of young students, especially young girls.

“If explicit attention isn’t paid to designing robotics experiences with broadening participation in mind, using robotics exclusively to address the “T” in STEM could exacerbate existing stereotypes and gender gaps in participation,” said Dr. Fletcher.

Fifth-grade teacher Kayla Heimann agreed.

“Recruiting students can be a challenge, especially young girls,” she said.

Teachers can be more supportive of inclusion by actively soliciting diverse students to participate, valuing the varied strengths that each student brings to the projects, and encouraging them to support each other wherever they may struggle. Daniel Garrison said that it took personal effort to break down these barriers.

“There are many pervasive misconceptions and preconceptions about who is capable of ‘doing’ robotics,” he said.

Non-profit organizations have stepped up to address the many challenges associated with robotics education. Garrison was able to bring robotics into his classroom through the non-profit Project Lead The Way and introduced his students to competitive robotics through FIRST Robotics, a program that involves 500,000 students across 100 countries in an after-school robotics curriculum. As of 2018, 31% of the students reached by FIRST are young girls, a third of whom go on to major in engineering.

Other organizations like SciGirls tackle inclusivity more broadly by providing resources that show teachers how to encourage girls to learn STEM subjects. BirdBrain technologies has a robot loan program specifically designed to reach underrepresented students. Programs like TeachWonder tackle the expense and lack of training by giving teachers who complete their online robotics and computational thinking course a free robot. And DonorsChoose supports teachers to design powerful instructional opportunities and apply for funding for materials, like robotics kits, to bring those opportunities to life.

As GoldieBlox founder Debbie Sterling once quipped, almost 90% of engineers are men, so we are literally living in a man’s world — and, I might add, an urban, affluent, and white man’s world at that. Robotics provides an exciting chance to inspire all students with skills, know-how and passion to be able to design a more inclusive and therefore more expansive and productive world for all of us. The field of robotics is only just breaking onto the PK-12 stage.  What we design now will have repercussions for the rest of the century.  Let’s not waste the chance.