A Robotics Experience for All the Students in an Elementary School

Abstract

Robotics can be a meaningful and motivating application of computer science that helps make abstract concepts concrete and visible, but most elementary school robotics thus far has focused on design and after school extra-curricular activities with small groups of select students rather than in-school, school-wide robotics for all the students within a school. This paper describes our experience designing, implementing, and trying to evaluate a robotics curriculum and program for all the students within an elementary school; the primary focus of this paper is scale. We describe challenges and opportunities we experienced as part of this project and reflect on the degree to which they are unique to our relatively small, isolated rural town and the timing of our project. We present data points suggesting that robotics can be effectively and economically implemented in the elementary school curriculum.