TITLE ROBOTS AND ROMEO AND JULIET : STUDYING TEACHER INTEGRATION OF ROBOTICS INTO MIDDLE SCHOOL CURRICULA

To increase opportunities for more students to engage in technology innovation, the Creative Robotics project supports robotics integration into disciplinary classrooms. The project provides professional development and resources to teachers in nontechnical subjects (e.g., health, science, English), while enabling them to develop their own instructional strategies for integrating the Arts & Bots approach. A study of pedagogical and instructional approaches of 15 teachers during the project’s first year suggests that teachers used Arts & Bots as a tool to support student learning to: (1) facilitate translation of abstract disciplinary concepts into concrete exemplars; (2) increase exposure to disciplinary material; or (3) increase familiarity with technology. This research underscores the importance of integrated curricula that consider disciplinary needs and technological affordances. Introduction Robots are becoming increasingly familiar in K-12 education. However, access to robotic technology is often limited to students in a subset of STEM-related courses (Benitti, 2012). The Creative Robotics project integrates design-based robotics into classrooms across a range of disciplines, including science, health, English/language arts, and social studies, and it provides opportunities to study changes in practice as teachers make instructional and curricular decisions to support disciplinary learning and technology innovation. Creative Robotics utilizes the Arts & Bots approach—a classroom robotics kit which provides motors, sensors, lights, and a microprocessor that can be controlled with a custom visual programming language (Hamner & Cross, 2013; Cross, Bartley, Hamner, & Nourbakhsh, 2013), and craft materials to build a robot and attach components. Arts & Bots provides a flexible base for a range for robotic design activities. Between 2013 and 2015, the Creative Robotics project trained 15 middle school teachers in two school districts (one rural, one suburban) to design and implement discipline-based robotics curricula. During the two-day professional development seminar teachers learned to build and program robots, and teacher educators led discussions about integrating robotics into disciplinary curricula (Hamner et al., 2016). Teachers were also given pedagogical tools to support robotics design activities, such as student design notebooks and storyboard templates. However, teachers were free to select the curricular topic and develop their own strategies for integrating Arts & Bots activities.