thank you! It was exciting to see you are connecting your project to teachers and K-12 students as well. I had no idea algae was so versatile. Nice work!

Hi Catherine, Thank you for your question! We did this virtual implementation in Spring 2020 with 19 teams and again in Spring 2021 with 16 teams. In most cases the teams are 1 PST, 1 engineering student, and 1 5th grader, but in some cases there were 2 5th graders and/or 2 engineering students. In Spring 2020 we had 19 simultaneous Zoom sessions every week. In spring 2021 we met together in a single Zoom session and split off into 16 breakout rooms. The single zoom room made it easier for us instructors to assist teams and to help track down missing students. It also meant we could more readily share challenges and successes as an entire group. If you'd like to read more about our Spring 2020 implementation, I do have a case study paper I can share that focuses on a single team's experience: https://cadrek12.org/resources/%E2%80%9Czooming...

As for a broader lens, we did find positive effects on the PSTs' engineering knowledge, self-efficacy, and intention to integrate engineering in their future instruction. These results will be shared at ASEE in July. We are just finishing our data collection from this spring's implementation.

HI Jaime, thank you for your question. We started the project a few years ago compiling robotic resources on our own (arduinos, LEDs, servos, jumper wires, etc). This was less expensive than using prepackaged kits but also created a pretty steep learning curve, especially for the children and preservice teachers. We switched to Hummingbird Bit kits about a year ago. These are expensive (close to $200 for one kit) but the prepackaged materials as well as the online resources provided by the manufacture, Birdbrain, make the technology more accessible. We did this virtual implementation in Spring 2020 with 19 teams (1 5th grader, 1 PST and 1 engineering student). We did it again in Spring 2021 with 16 teams (16 PSTs, 24 5th graders, and 22 engineering students). In Spring 2020 we had 19 simultaneous Zoom sessions every week. In spring 2021 we met together in a single Zoom session and split off into 16 breakout rooms. The single zoom room made it easier for us instructors to assist teams and to help track down missing students. It also meant we could more readily share challenges and successes as an entire group. If you'd like to read more about our first implementation, I do have a paper I can share: https://cadrek12.org/resources/%E2%80%9Czooming...

Hi Jennifer, thank you for your question! Yes, LOADS of challenges working over Zoom. Besides the obvious issues of poor/slow Internet connections, we also found a significant difference in elementary students' willingness to engage in spring 2021 as compared to Spring 2020. The children were much more reluctant to turn on their cameras and share orally this past spring as compared to a year ago. This complicated an already difficult process. We were challenged especially by troubleshooting as each child worked to build their own robot. There were so many potential sources of failure and not being able to clearly see all the wiring connections, the coding, etc, it was very hard to diagnose the root of a problem. Just helping students connect wires  became a very long process. On the plus side, each child and college student who built their own robot could really feel a sense of personal triumph as they basically had to complete this process independently. We also found that all participants benefitted from having their Hummingbird Robotics kits at home. This meant students could work at their own pace and for a more extended period that they would have been able to in a once a week after school club (where the kits remain at school).

Your project looks very exciting - smart plan to tap into the existing 4H network. I've become very interested in the benefits of relationships for fostering STEM learning. I see you mentioned using the teens as teachers as a COVID adaptation. Do you think this was equally beneficial for both the mentors and mentees?

Thanks so much for visiting Seung. It took the team multiple tries before they all understood how to successfully mount their servos! Your project looks very exciting. How wonderful that you were able to continue to promote these relationships during the pandemic. Could you give me an example or two of the types of problems the students were addressing within their local communities?

Hi Sylvia, It's very exciting to see that you too were able to run your program virtually. Tinkercad and your home 3D print and mail system seemed to work out great! You were nice to your facilitators by providing some PD! My education students got a crash course in teaching via Zoom in Spring 2020 when we switched to virtual. They had to learn to teach online while learning to build a robot at the same time! It was interesting that this Spring 2021 was not necessarily easier than Spring 2020, even though we had our prior experience to draw from. In Spring 2021 we found that many kids (and the college students too) were just more burnt out from on-line learning and more reluctant to participate in the online setting. I don't have a curriculum, but my students all adapted a basic lesson plan I provided for them. We used Hummingbird Bit robotics kits, by Birdbrain and they actually provide a ton of online resources that are really helpful. We switched to the kits after working from scratch/ordering separate components. The kits are expensive but they are really nice for the younger kids. 

I was able to watch your second video which helped me see how you were able to make the ROV competition come to life virtually. A few years ago I thought we'd really see the Second Life-type virtual environments take off in education, but I hadn't see too much work in that area recently so I wondered if if people were switching gears. I am excited to see that immersive VR experiences are alive and well in your program. I was inspired watching your first video a few days ago. I got me thinking about a fun engineering challenge we did with Sphero robots in the water a couple years back. Essentially we just asked students to design a harness for the Sphero to save a "drowning" victim (I think we used a plastic egg or something). Adding the underwater element makes it very exciting for kids and also very applicable to real world challenges. Your video got me thinking that I should revisit the water challenge. And yes, these one-on-one interactions provide for powerful learning experiences: for both the kids and the college students. Definitely a win-win!

Hi Meredith, Thank you for watching our video!! I am Krishna Kaipa, one of the collaborators on the project. We had three collaboration models in the project. Each model paired undergraduates from an engineering course with preservice teachers from an education course. In two of the three models, engineering students selected some of the engineering concepts that they learnt as part of their course to support the training of preservice teachers in those concepts and help prepare lesson plans that they eventually used to teach the fourth graders. In the collaboration that was featured in the video, we explored a different model where engineering students and preservice teachers simultaneously learnt coding and robot building concepts together with training support from both education and engineering instructors. Although no special training, building of relationships was mainly facilitated by having them coordinate with each other and work offline on collaboration agreement and lesson plan templates that were provided to them as google docs. We also noticed that relationships evolved stronger as they met in every session during the robot building activities. While feedback was provided by engineering students on technical aspects mainly in real time as they worked together on their robots, we also provided them with feedback forms via google docs, where engineering students could comment on the progress of the preservice teachers' robots.

Hi Channa, Thank you for visiting our project!! Great questions!! Our work is part of two NSF projects that we have been pursuing over a span of few years now. Our interventions started a few semesters before COVID (Fall 2018) when it was all in-person learning and transitioned midway to fully online learning when the pandemic hit us in spring 2020. Both quantitative and qualitative data collected since then (couple of semesters in-person, one semester a mix of in-person followed by online experiences, and one semester fully online) in terms of pre-/post- surveys, reflections, and focus groups have provided us with several distinct interventional regimes to compare against, eventually informing us of a multitude of lessons moving forward. One of the primary benefits of in-person settings is the strong/rich relationships that it nurtures among the participants, which we found had foundational impacts on their overall learning experiences, leading to successful outcomes. Spring 2020 implementation gave us special insights--the in-person training phase that happened over three sessions established enough bonding between the preservice teachers and their engineering student partners, which carried over and made it easier for them to collaborate and work with 5th graders over zoom as they transitioned to an online teaching phase. While in-person settings prior to COVID made it easier for engineering undergraduates and preservice teachers to provide help to elementary students as they shared physical space during hands-on activities, this aspect became a challenge during online setting. However, a benefit in disguise of how it put the fourth/fifth graders on spot sometimes and made them think, debug, and solve problems all by themselves with minimal help coming from the undergraduate students remotely over zoom. Another benefit of zoom was how it cut down on the overall time of each intervention (students didn't have to physically travel anywhere and could instantly switch from/to other classes they had to attend). All these experiences and the lessons learnt so far are priming us well as we return to in-person teaching in the upcoming semesters. Meeting with teachers during yearly advisory board meetings tells us that there is certainly a high level of interest among the schools in our locale in providing this type of engineering and coding education in regular school classes as they prepare to align with recent adaptations to State standards of learning. Yes, we strongly believe results inferred from the collected data will evidence the positive benefits of such a hands-on approach to STEM learning and help persuade school/district level administrators toward implementations in the near future.                 

Thank you for visiting our project! We gave awards in all sorts of fun categories and we were also very lucky to have a representative from Birdbrain Technologies, the maker of the Hummingbird kits, to attend our showcase and present some special "industry awards". I believe it was nice for the children and the college students to receive recognition from an outside business. I loves seeing the families tinkering in your videos. Were members of your team connected to the families via Zoom while they were working or were the families just recording? If your team was connected what was their role? I think your idea of tying the creation process to a story is a powerful, motivating one. Were all the stories grounded in emotion-based contexts e.g. these toys are sad? I'm also curious about the research you will do with the videos. We, like you, now have hours and hours of video, and we are trying to determine the best methods for analyzing our data. Have you explore video research tools?

Professor Kaipa,

There is clearly good reason for our programs to follow one another; to continue to learn from one another.

I very much look forward to staying in touch! 

Just followed you on Twitter too:   Twitter @edgineering_ODU

:-)

Yes!!! I hope you find a way. I have to share the 5th grader winner from this spring's program: https://youtu.be/n_P6KJ8XMbk. (Dinnerbone is a Minecraft inspired name - I had no idea!!) There are so many great resources. We do love the Hummingbird Kits and they have a wonderful website with project ideas, tutorials, etc. You can do the same thing for much cheaper if you compile the resources yourself, but that's definitely more work for you and the kids. We've also had fun with Sphero robots - and engineering components to add on to them e.g. "chariots" to carry a stick figure around the room. 

Hi Lisa, Thanks for watching our video!! I am glad you liked our work!! Congratulations for the great work done in your ITEST project too!! I particularly liked the aspect of kids being able to identify with, and mirror, engineers/scientists hailing from their own cultural backgrounds. I'll visit your site and leave some more comments there!