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Democratizing K-6 STEAM Education with Open-Source Robotics
In this paper, we examine the use of open-source robotics to democratize K-6 STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art, math) education. Robots are ideal for teaching STEAM due to the multidisciplinary nature of the platform with connections to computer science, engineering, math, humanities, arts, and social science. There are many challenges with using robotics for STEAM education including lack of appropriate knowledgebase, cost effective platforms, flexible robots, and limited learning activities. The use of a low-cost open source 3D printed platform such as the Flower∞Bots would address several of these challenges. First, since the platform is open source, the videos, tutorials, design files, code, learning activities and materials are freely available online. This provides educators with the knowledge base necessary to teach STEAM to their class. It also provides them with the ability to access, modify, and update the platform and learning activities to be flexible enough to meet their learning goals. Since the platform is half 3D printed and half commercial off the shelf parts, it is low-cost enough to scale, as necessary.
The Flower∞Bots platform, so named due to its ability to grow with the user through an infinite number of learning activities, was used to teach K-6 teachers computer science principles in professional development workshops during the 2023-2024 school year. The Lily∞Bot platform with the Micro:Bit was used to teach a Level I workshop with graphical programming to K – 5 teachers. The Lily∞Bot platform with the Arduino Uno was used to teach a Level II workshop with TinkerCad, text-based and graphical programming to 4-8 teachers. Participants built, programmed, and completed activities related to the state computing foundation and computer science standards. At the conclusion of the workshop, the participants brainstormed how to integrate these concepts into their classroom, completed a feedback survey, and attended a virtual follow up session. In the follow up session, they shared classroom artifacts based upon their participation in the professional development workshop. Preliminary results indicated that the workshops were useful and that teachers were able to make teaching artifacts for building and programming. Results will be presented and conclusions drawn regarding the ability of low-cost modular 3D printed open-source robots to democratize STEAM education.