2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition
Board 433: Work in Progress: Building a “Project-Based Learning for Rural Alabama STEM Middle School Teachers in Machine Learning and Robotics” RET Site
Presented at NSF Grantees Poster Session
This work in progress paper describes results from a Research Experiences for Teachers (RET) in Engineering and Computer Science grant. The objective of this project is to establish a new RET Site under CISE at Auburn University (AU) in Alabama. With the title "RET Site: Project-Based Learning for Rural Alabama STEM Middle School Teachers in Machine Learning and Robotics", it will provide research experiences to 10 middle school math and science teachers in the 7th-8th grades each year via a 6-week summer program and 9-month academic year follow-up, with the research focused on smart mobile robots.
The global leadership of U.S. largely relies on the future workforce in the fields of science and engineering. However, at rural schools in underserved areas of Alabama, often times teachers may be teaching without adequate knowledge and capabilities. Subsequently, their lack of content knowledge adversely impacts STEM persistence and engagement for underrepresented minorities (URMs). Inspired and motivated by this need, the RET Site will provide research experiences to middle school math and science teachers in rural Alabama, especially the Alabama Black Belt region, with the focus on smart robots that integrate robotics with ML/AI, which have seen tremendous advances in the past few years. Teachers will participate in education and research activities on state-of-the-art technologies in robotics and ML/AI, to explore various research topics encompassing faculty mentors' active research projects, including edge computing, computer vision, autonomous navigation, indoor localization, and reinforcement learning. To support hands-on research projects, we will leverage a novel platform of ML-based mobile robots that is friendly and accessible to teachers. Teachers will collaborate with engineering and STEM education faculty to develop engaging project-based curricular modules on robotics and ML/AI for classroom education at their local schools. Teachers will practice teaching the curricular modules that they have developed for this RET project to middle school students in a summer camp at AU. Engineering and education faculty will follow up with teachers to facilitate implementation of the RET curriculum modules in their classroom. The curriculum will focus on smart robots based on ML/AI, which encompasses cutting-edge technologies on robotics, machine learning (ML), and artificial intelligence (AI). To this end, this project aims to provide the following experiences: 1) learning the fundamentals of robotics and ML/AI, and 2) conducting research activities focused on robotics and ML/AI. This project will also leverage various mechanisms that allow teachers to translate their research experiences into project-based classroom STEM education at local schools. In particular, as little is known about how the intersections of race, poverty, local environment, and regional culture affect the student group’s perceptions of potential engineering career pathways, this research seeks to understand the effects of different interventions on students’ self-efficacy and interest in engineering. This paper highlights the structure of these programs and findings to date.
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Dr. Daniela Marghitu Auburn University [biography]
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Dr. Thaddeus A. Roppel Auburn University [biography]
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