2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Background: Pre-college engineering education has been shown to increase students’ interest in engineering pathways, and robotics education plays a key role in supporting technological engagement. However, existing research is largely context-specific, underscoring the need for large-scale analyses that capture broader patterns in how robotics education is discussed and experienced across diverse settings.
Purpose: This work-in-progress study leverages social media data to examine broad perspectives on pre-college robotics education by analyzing themes and emotional expressions in Reddit discussions. In particular, we ask: What themes characterize online discussions about robotics education, and how are these themes associated with distinct emotional profiles?

Methods: We collected English-language Reddit posts from 2023 to 2025 from subreddits associated with K–12 robotics education and robotics competitions (e.g., FLL, FTC, FRC). Posts were retrieved using education-related keywords such as course, curriculum, student, programming, and competition, resulting in a total of 4,214 posts. Topic modeling was conducted using BERTopic with OpenAI embeddings. Topic labels and summaries were generated using GPT-4o-mini. Sentiment analysis was performed using LLM-generated JSON outputs, with emotions aggregated at the topic level.

Results: Nine themes emerged from the topic modeling analysis, including Exploring Robotics Education Resources, Seeking Mentorship in Robotics Education, Troubleshooting Robotics Programming, Enchanted Robotics Class Concepts, Sharing Resources for Robotics Education, Challenges in Online Robotics Resources, Collecting Robotics Pins for Education, Future Tools for Robotics Education, and Dean’s List and Robotics Involvement. The distribution of posts across topics was highly uneven. Across themes, discussions were characterized by high levels of curiosity and excitement, alongside varying degrees of frustration and anxiety, reflecting both enthusiasm for robotics education and challenges related to technical and instructional support.

Next Steps: Future work will focus on improving post classification and integrating qualitative analysis. More fine-grained or hierarchical topic modeling approaches will be explored to better handle noise inherent in heterogeneous Reddit discussions. In addition, human coding will be incorporated to distinguish posts from teachers, students, and parents, with particular attention to teacher perspectives, and to examine how instructional contexts and technical constraints shape emotional experiences in robotics education.