2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Board 332: Measuring the Impact of a Soft Robotics Curriculum Embedded in Physics Classes on Students' Engineering Knowledge, Identity, and Career Interest

Presented at NSF Grantees Poster Session

Participation in extracurricular educational robotics, tinkering, and building are common precursors to enrollment in engineering majors. Perceptions of pre-college robotics focused on competitions can prevent some students from participating. By broadening the applications of robotics to human-centered designs and bringing soft material robotics into classroom curricula, the field of soft robotics may be a platform to engage a diversity of students in K12 robotics and later, engineering majors. Until recently, most soft robotics work resided in university research labs or as K12 activities presented through practitioner-delivered outreach events. Until soft robot activities are put in the hands of teachers, their reach remains limited. We leveraged teacher input to develop and deliver an introduction to soft robotics curriculum suitable for high school physics classrooms. This paper details teacher-informed development and analysis of a four-day soft robotics curriculum that introduces the field, technical concepts, and allows for student experimentation and design. We used a mixed methods approach to understand how the curriculum broadened students’ understanding of engineering. Data collected during the implementation show that students learned and could recall new information about the field of soft robotics, understood more about career paths in robotics, and gained confidence in teaching others about this new field. Reflections from the classroom teacher and feedback from students in a secondary school physics course show that soft robotics can expand perceptions of who can participate in engineering. Results demonstrate that integrating a soft robotics curriculum in high schools may provide a pathway to recruit students to robotics and engineering careers.

Authors

Dr. Holly M Golecki http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3691-0420 University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign [biography]

Dr. Holly Golecki (she/her) is a Teaching Assistant Professor in Bioengineering at the University of
Illinois Urbana-Champaign and an Associate in the John A Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University. She holds an appointment at the Carle-Illinois College of Medicine in the Department of Biomedical and Translational Sciences. She is also a core faculty member at the Institute for Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Access in the College of Engineering. Holly studies biomaterials and soft robotics and their applications in the university classroom, in undergraduate research and in engaging K12 students in STEM. Holly received her BS/MS in Materials Science and Engineering from Drexel University and her PhD in Engineering Sciences from Harvard University.
Dr. Karin Jensen http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9456-5042 University of Michigan [biography]

Karin Jensen, Ph.D. (she/her) is an assistant professor in biomedical engineering and engineering education research at the University of Michigan. Her research interests include mental health and wellness, engineering student career pathways, and engagement of engineering faculty in engineering education research.
Karen T. Klebbe Centennial High School, Champaign IL [biography]

Karen Klebbe is a twenty year educator in the Champaign public school system with a Master of Science in Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is currently the Library Director at Centennial High School in Champaign, Illinois.
Thomas Tran University of Chicago [biography]

Thomas Tran earned his undergraduate degree in bioengineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). There he engaged in engineering education and soft robotics research in the Golecki Group. He helped design a soft robotics curriculum aimed at exposing K-12 students to engineering. He implemented the program with over 150 students and has published literature and results detailing students’ perceptions of engineering. He is currently pursuing a Master's of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago.
Elizabeth Ann McNeela University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign [biography]

Bioengineering undergraduate student interested in the effects of outreach programs and curriculums on engineering enrollment.

Download paper (1.94 MB)

Are you a researcher? Would you like to cite this paper? Visit the ASEE document repository at peer.asee.org for more tools and easy citations.

» Download paper

« View session