In Kansas, there are many schools, due to a rural or underserved nature, that
fall short in providing access to technical resources to further interest in
science education. We have developed a program, using robots, to interest school
children in technical disciplines. This program is targeted at schools that do
not have people or financial resources to fund a similar program on their own.
To make the program interesting, robots are utilized as the vehicle to excite
children about science. Our experience indicates that robots are almost
universally captivating for children of all ages, in our case, K-12 students.

Description:
The Robot Roadshow Program uses a three step process: Pre-visit
workbooks, the visit and presentation, and a follow-up session
with the faculty to evaluate student impact.

The initial step is to send a
workbook, consisting of puzzles, short readings, definitions and creative
exercises, in advance for each student to complete. There is a different
workbook for each of the following age groups: K-3, 4-6, 7-9, 10-12. Tailored by
age group, the workbook will develop an appropriate set of skills and knowledge
mandatory to get the most from the program upon the visit day. On the visit day,
several of our robots will go to the school for interactive experiments with the
students. Each experiment injects and reinforces principles of science in an
interesting, fun and unique way for the students. The faculty follow-up session
reviews and evaluates the impact on individual students and the class as a
whole. The follow-up review is used to revise and continually improve the
program to maximize the impact of the participant experience.

Goals:

1. Create opportunity for underserved/rural schools to have access to additional
learning resources.

2. Allow the students to enjoy math and science.

3. Allow students to build a relationship between the study of math and science
and interesting subjects (robots).

4. Create process to reinforce the experience, so that after the visit the child's
interest doesn't deteriorate.

Contact Information:

Scott A. DeLoach
Assistant Professor

Department of Computing & Information Sciences
Kansas State University
234 Nichols Hall
Manhattan, KS USA 66506-2302
(785) 532-6350
http://www.cis.ksu.edu/~sdeloach/