Abstract
Research on early childhood robotics education often focuses narrowly on teaching young children STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) concepts and skills. In this qualitative case study, our research team examined what happened when we worked with young children (age 7) and combined the technologies of robotics education with an inquiry approach, that is, an opportunity for students to collaboratively identify a problem arising from their own lived experiences and build a robot to solve it. We found that the process of children’s problem identification was dialogic, not only with peers and teachers but also with materials, as they defined and refined problems based on interactions with peers and objects. As this study was conducted at an economically disadvantaged public school in the Southern United States, we argue that early childhood robotics education has a great potential to engage young children in STEM learning in a personally meaningful manner and that an instructional approach fostering children’s inquiry and project-based learning through their problem finding and problem posing is effective in making STEM accessible to students from diverse backgrounds.
Keywords
Introduction
Being able to identify a problem, generate possible solutions, and select the most effective and efficient solution in a given situation and constraint is critical to children’s learning and development as competent students in school and as thoughtful citizens in society. The purpose of this study is to explore early childhood robotics education as an instructional approach that encourages children to not only learn concepts and skills relevant to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) but also engage in identifying and solving problems arising from their daily lives.
Inspired by Seymour Papert, who designed Logo Turtle in the late 1960s, researchers have begun exploring how to make robotics accessible to children. Although much of the existing literature on robotics education focuses on older children in upper elementary, middle, and high schools (e.g. Barak and Zadok, 2009; Brand et al., 2008; Grubbs, 2013; Karp and Maloney, 2013; Liu, 2010), a growing number of studies have investigated the role of robotics in early childhood education (Bers et al., 2014; Cejka et al., 2006; Highfield, 2010; Levy and Mioduser, 2008). For example, using the TangibleK robotics program designed by their research team, Bers et al. (2014) showed that kindergartners are capable of learning robotics, programming, and computational thinking. Highfield (2010) also introduced a variety of tasks through which young children can use robotic manipulatives to develop mathematical concepts and skills (e.g. number, length, distance, and directionality). Our study expands upon these researchers’ efforts to integrate robotics and engineering into early childhood curricula.
Problem identification and problem solving in early childhood robotics
While many robotics curricula, especially in upper grades, tend to center around teaching STEM concepts and skills (Barker and Ansorge, 2007; Bers et al., 2014; Bianco, 2014; Gelman and Brenneman, 2004; Grubbs, 2013; Sahin et al., 2014), Benitti (2012) called for “multiple pathways into robotics” (p. 979) in order to encourage diverse children’s participation in robotics. To this end, Rusk et al. (2008) suggested four pedagogical strategies for robotics education, including (a) focusing on themes in addition to challenges, (b) incorporating art with engineering, (c) encouraging storytelling, and (d) holding exhibitions as opposed to competitions. According to these researchers, when the robotics curriculum focuses on a shared theme, rather than on a set problem or a challenge posed by the teacher (e.g. program your robot to move through this maze), children have the opportunity to engage in the real-world scenario of “problem finding” (p. 61). They explained: “In most real-world design projects, a critical part of the process is identifying and refining the problem to be solved” (p. 61, emphasis added). Problem-finding allows students to explore their own interests while engaging in a crucial part of the work that engineers do, that is, identifying real-world problems that robots can help solve.
Rusk et al.’s (2008) problem-finding approach echoes Freire’s (1970) problem-posing pedagogy. Freire argued that, contrary to a banking model of education positioning students as passive recipients of the teacher’s deposits of knowledge, the problem-posing model of education recognizes learning as a process of inquiry and involves students in the “posing of problems of human beings in their relation with the world” (p. 169). Similarly, proposing the project method as an instructional approach, Kilpatrick (1918) conceptualized a project as “the hearty purposeful act” actualizing the ideal that “education is life” (p. 320), not a mere preparation for later life. He claimed that educational experience should have a resemblance to the worthy life, which consists of the “purposive activity” (p. 322) and which encourages learners to consider practical and ethical implications. Drawing on Kilpatrick’s idea, Katz and Chard (2000) articulated that, in the project approach, “children’s ideas, questions, theories, predictions, and interests are major determinations of the experiences provided and the work accomplished” (p. 5). Rusk et al.’s problem-finding approach, Freire’s problem-posing pedagogy, and Kilpatrick’s project method emphasize children’s inquiry, which appreciates their problem identification and problem solving.
Some researchers echo the call for robotics to allow “children to investigate everyday phenomena in their own lives” (Alimisis and Kynigos, 2009: 11), but few studies have examined how to do problem identification in robotics with young children or offer insight into what it might look like to do so. We attempt to close this gap in the research literature by investigating what happens when we ask children to collaboratively identify a problem and to build a robot to solve it.
Methods
Setting and participants
This study was conducted with a second-grade class (age 7–8) at a Title 1 public elementary school in the Southern United States. Title I is a US law enacted in 1965 which distributes funding to schools with a high percentage of low-income students. Conducting the study at a public elementary school designated as Title I, we intended to make accessible engaging robotics education to underserved populations. The robotics education program was implemented with 24 children (12 boys and 12 girls), including 10 European American, 9 Latino/a American, 3 multi-racial, and 2 African American children. This group of children was organized by the school for their enrichment class. According to the two teachers leading the enrichment class, Jodi and Tariana, 1 these students were selected from different second-grade classrooms based on their academic achievement, in particular, for having met grade-level standards, and five of them were identified as gifted.
Our research team designed and taught 25- to 45-minute classes once a week for 9 weeks in Spring 2015. We used two commercially available robotic manipulatives: Bee-Bots (© Terrapin Software) and Cubelets (© Modular Robotics). Bee-Bots are programmable floor robots. Children program the robots’ movements using directional commands (e.g. forward, backward, left, and right). Cubelets are robotic blocks that promote children’s learning about sensors (e.g. a light sensor and a distance sensor), actuators called actors (e.g. a flashlight actor, a bar graph actor, and a sound actor), and their causal relationships. The 24 children were divided into two groups of 12. Each group spent 4 weeks with one type of the robotic manipulatives before switching to the other. In the final session (Week 9), we conducted a semi-structured interview with each group as a form of reflection on the robotics classes. For this article, we focus on the culminating activity of the Cubelets classes in which the participating children were encouraged to collaboratively identify problems in their lives and build robots to solve the problems. Before discussing our data collection and data analysis, we briefly describe activities provided in the Cubelets classes next.
Activities of the Cubelets classes
In the Cubelets classes, the activities of the first 2 weeks were designed for children to learn about how the Cubelet robot works. We prepared experiments for the children to come to understand the functions of three basic Cubelets (e.g. a sensor, an actor, and a battery) and the relations between sensors and actors. For example, a small group explored how the amount of light absorbed by a light sensor would make a difference in the frequency of sound produced by a speaker actor. Another group examined how the distance between a wood block and a distance sensor would change the number of bars illuminated on a bar graph actor. During the third week, we presented the children with two problems that our research team had generated and asked the children to build robots to solve those problems. One problem was related to developing a robot that could help animals cross the road safely at night, and the other problem was to design a robot that would help an injured mail carrier push heavy packages. For the culminating activity in the fourth week, small groups of two or three children applied the knowledge and skills learned in the previous 3 weeks to build a robot to solve a problem identified by themselves and presented their robot to the rest of the class. Table 1 summarizes the weekly activities in the Cubelets classes.
Weekly activities of the Cubelets classes.
Data collection and analysis
While leading weekly robotics classes, we generated video-recorded observation and interview data with children and teachers. For observation data, we used four video cameras in each class and collected a total of 35 hours of video recordings. For interviews, we adopted Tobin et al.’s (2009) “multivocal video-cued interviews,” which use video clips to elicit responses from participants. We selected a series of still images from the video data and showed them to the participating children during the reflective class discussions at the last session, generating 1 hour of interview data. We also shared video clips with the two enrichment class teachers for a 2-hour interview with them. All interviews with the children and teachers were audio- and video-recorded and transcribed for analysis. In addition, we collected artifacts, including children’s weekly activity logs that we called Engineer Logs in which children recorded their thinking and daily work (see Figure 1).
Engineer log sheet.
For this article, we analyzed video data collected during the fourth week of the Cubelets class to pay close attention to problems identified and solutions generated by the participating children’s collaboration. In addition to the analysis of video data, we also analyzed the transcripts of the teacher interview relevant to the culminating activity. We were interested in exploring the potentialities and the processes of connecting early childhood robotics education to young children’s inquiry into their lived experiences. Following our research questions: what happens when children work to collaboratively identify a problem and build a robot to solve it, we analyzed the video and interview data by identifying patterns in the participating children’s verbal, written, and physical interactions with people (e.g. peers, teachers, and research team members) and with instructional materials (e.g. robotic manipulatives, props, and other objects in the classroom).
Findings
Our data analysis revealed that children constructed rather than simply picked problems through dialogue and negotiation with each other based on their shared life experiences and that their problems and robot designs were inspired by the materials surrounding them. We in turn discuss each of these findings.
Dialogic problem identification based on shared life experiences
The process of the children’s problem identification often involved one student voicing an idea and then another groupmate challenging it. This process encouraged the children to collaborate to clarify and further expand their idea. The following vignette illustrates how Sara, Nora, and Eliana came up with their group problem:
Vignette 1
Sara asks her group, “What is going to be our problem?” Eliana responds, “Oh, I have an idea. Let’s say the mailman has to deliver something.” Sara chimes in, “We already did that,” referring to the previous week when our research team gave the class the challenge of building a robot that could help a mail carrier move heavy packages. The conversation pauses as the girls read aloud the directions on the day’s log sheet. Following that, Nora asks again, “The problem. What’s gonna be our problem?” And then she quickly responds to her own question by exclaiming, “I think I know what our problem could be!” She excitedly bounces on her knees. Eliana passes her the log sheet, and Nora continues, “So the mailman has to deliver some- (pauses).” Sara inserts again, “We already did that one last week.” “No,” Nora responds, explaining how her idea is different: “Last week the mailman had to push the boxes. OK. So the mailman has to deliver something. He has to send some mail to another person but he can’t carry all that stuff-.” Eliana adds on, “And the truck that he works on doesn’t work anymore? And he broke his leg and he can’t work.”
As shown, Eliana’s and Nora’s idea about the mailman having difficulty in delivering mail was challenged by Sara, who reminded her peers of the similar problem presented by our research team in the previous week. Sara’s question led Eliana and Nora to further differentiate their idea from the previous week’s task by building on each other’s thoughts and by adding complications (e.g. the mailman having both an inoperable truck and broken his leg).
Similarly, in the other groups, the children negotiated with each other to define problems on which groupmates could agree, as presented in the following vignette:
Vignette 2
Caleb, Isaac and Emma are standing around their table. On their table rests the day’s log sheet, each of their personally colored Engineer Log folders, a cup of pencils, and six Cubelets (a light sensor, a distance sensor, a drive actor, a light actor, a bargraph actor, and a battery). Caleb reads over the log sheet, looks up, and asks his groupmates, “So what should our problem be?” At first Isaac responds, “I don’t know.” Then, holding up the drive Cubelet, he says, “I can’t reach high places.” Receiving no response from his teammates, he dismisses that idea with a shake of his head, “No.” He says something (inaudible) to Emma, and she taps his arm as if to let him know she doesn’t like the idea. Isaac continues brainstorming other ideas, “Ok, so what’s my need? My need is to wake me up in the morning. I need a robot to wake me up in the morning. That’s what I need.” Then Caleb gets excited, “Oh! I got it! If you don’t have an alarm clock, we can make one. Yes!” He says this emphatically, leaning towards Emma. Isaac pushes the drive actor along the back and up the side of the table, as if he were pushing a toy car. Caleb sees the drive Cubelet in Isaac’s hand, takes it from Isaac, and connects it to the other Cubelets already in his hand. Isaac says, “We’re not gonna make a move– (pauses).” Then he inhales and suddenly gets excited, “Or, yeah! We can make one that moves so it can move, move into my nightstand! Rrrrr.” He makes an engine noise. Caleb replies, “Yeah, that will be the alarm clock.” Isaac exclaims, “Wait- we don’t have a speaker!” He turns to Shara, who is leading the class, and says, “We don’t have a speaker! Do we have a speaker? We need a speaker.” He leaves the table in search of a speaker actor, as Caleb and Emma begin to put Cubelet blocks together.
In this vignette, Isaac’s initial thought (i.e. I can’t reach high places) and another idea shared with Emma were not picked up by his groupmates. However, his announcement for needing help waking up in the morning was enthusiastically accepted by Caleb, who suggested making an alarm clock and solicited Emma’s agreement through body language. Then, the two boys were inspired by the drive actor Cubelet on their table and decided to make a moving alarm clock robot. With this agreement, Isaac went to find a missing Cubelet block for his group’s robot design, while Caleb and Emma began to build the robot.
As illustrated above, in the participating children’s problem-identification process, a problem was not something out there, simply waiting to be picked. As Graue and Walsh (1998) argued for generating data rather than collecting data in interpretive research, the children’s problem identification was in their inquiry “a very active, creative, and improvisational process” (p. 91) that required generating ideas through dialogue. Collaborating with peers to bounce their ideas off of one another, the children were able to make their ideas more refined and sophisticated. Watching each group’s problem-identification and problem-solving process on videos during the teacher interview, one of the enrichment class teachers, Jodi, acknowledged the dialogic nature of children’s problem identification: “The kids can play off of each other. They really are listening to each other and continuing their thoughts.”
The problem generated and defined by each group reflected their shared life experiences. The participating children in four small groups identified the problems of (a) waking up in the morning, (b) a mail carrier who had broken his leg and had an inoperative truck, (c) bullying, and (d) removing debris from the road. These problems gave us insight into issues and challenges that the children might have experienced or observed, as illustrated below:
Vignette 3
Hector, Craig, and Josue sit close to one another cross-legged on the carpet next to a large poster board with six Cubelets on it. Hector asks his teammates, “What is the problem you all wanted to solve?” After a pause, Craig responds, “People being mean at school.” Hector considers how to make a robot that “senses bullies.” He reaches out to the Cubelets that are resting on the board and starts indicating the drive actor Cubelet with his pencil. “We can put this with the sensor and it can move over there,” he signals the other end of the board with his pencil and continues to share his ideas, “and we can use the bargraph to show us how far away the bully is.” Hector holds up each Cubelet and explains to his teammates how he plans for it to function in the robot before returning to record his thoughts in his group log. Holding up the drive actor Cubelet, he asks, “How about we first use this one?” He also holds up the distance sensor and says, “And then we use this one that detects the bully.” He connects the battery Cubelet and the light sensor as he asks aloud, “Wait, where’s the bargraph?” Hector asks Shara for a bargraph actor Cubelet, which will be used to indicate how far away the bully is. Upon seeing the light actor Cubelet, Hector holds it up and explains to his teammates, “And we’ll add a light in case at night it shines a bright light on it and it makes that noise so it scares the bully away.” Josue tests it out by lightly tapping Hector on the knee and by looking intently at the robot to see how it’s reacting to his pretend bullying of Hector. All three boys start playfully hitting one another. “It works!” says Craig, “it started beeping really fast [when we were hitting each other].”
During the teacher interview, Jodi provided us with contextual information related to these children’s interest in building a robot to stop bullying:
So there are bullies in both of [my and Josue’s homeroom teacher’s] classrooms, I hate to say it.
And you’ve talked with the kids about bullies?
Yes, we’ve talked … [Every] month our counselor has a counseling session with the kids, and the first thing she asks is, “Has anybody been bullied?” And sometimes it had already been resolved, but they still want to bring it up … [We] let them know that you can always tell somebody and don’t be afraid to do that … The same thing’s happening in [Josue’s] classroom.
Jodi explained that bullying was a shared concern among second-grade classrooms. Because of this ongoing issue, she “[wasn’t] surprised” that Josue’s group identified the problem of bullies.
When presenting their robot to the rest of the class, Hector explained that the distance sensor Cubelet detected the bully, the bar graph actor Cubelet showed how close the bully was, and the sound and light actor Cubelets scared the bully off. The group thoughtfully incorporated their understandings of how different parts of the Cubelets function into their design of a robot that would warn about and ward off a bully, their real-life problem.
Material inspirations
In the process of problem identification and problem solving, the participating children were in dialogue with the materials themselves and were impacted by those objects available and unavailable to them. For example, in Vignette 2, having a drive actor Cubelet at his group’s table may have inspired Isaac and his groupmates to want to make an alarm clock robot that moves. Likewise, these children would not have been able to fulfill their vision of the alarm clock robot without a speaker actor Cubelet and so they asked Shara, who led the Cubelets classes, for one. In the next vignettes, we focus on a group consisting of a twin brother and sister in order to further describe how the students considered materials in their problem identification and problem solving:
Vignette 4
On the table between Josh and Madison rest their individual Engineer Log folders, the day’s log sheet, a cup of pencils, and six Cubelets (a distance sensor, a light sensor, a drive actor, a light actor, a bargraph actor, and a battery). A teacher announces that they have one more minute to identify their problem before moving on to the next step of the activity. “One more minute!” Josh echoes. Madison jumps up and down. “Oh!” she exclaims. She pulls the pencil cup in front of her. “Ok, so we could use this cup and we could build- (pauses).” She walks over to the end of the table and begins to sort through the six Cubelets, lifting up each one and examining it before setting it back down. Simultaneously, Josh takes one pencil out of the cup and places it down in front of him, looking at it intently. He then pulls the entire cup of pencils over to him. “Oh wait!” he says. “So what if this cup tipped over and all of the pencils fell out? What would you do?” He simulates this by holding the cup in his right hand and wrapping his left hand around all the pencils. He gently lays the cup on its side with the bottom of the pencils still in it but poking out. Madison continues surveying the Cubelets on the table. “Oh good,” she muses, picking up the drive Cubelet and holding onto it while she continues to quickly lift up and place down the others on the table. “Where is our other Cubelet?” she asks. Josh answers, “That’s the only [drive] Cubelet that we have.” “Yeah, but this is the only Cubelet that has wheels,” Madison explains. “Come on, we’re just gonna use it,” Josh encourages her. “OK,” she agrees and runs back to the other side of the table, repositioning herself across from Josh and takes ahold of the toppled cup. “Try your problem,” Josh instructs. Madison turns the cup right-side up. “What if this was tipped over?” Josh explains, indicating that the cup should once again lay on its side. “So you write that down,” Josh tells Madison. Madison returns the cup to its tipped position and says, “OK. Oooh!” She begins to take the pencils out of the cup and says, “What if all these pencils poured out, and the Cubelets pushed them all back in?” She positions the pencils poised at the entrance to the cup, ready for something to usher them in (see the photo on the left side of Figure 2).
In this vignette, Madison and Josh were both inspired by the materials on their table (i.e. the cup of pencils) and limited by the objects they had (i.e. one drive actor Cubelet). For this session, each group was given a set of six Cubelets. Having a limited number of Cubelets, we distributed them differently to each group. For example, some groups received sound actors, while others received light actors. Some had light sensors, while others had distance sensors. All groups had one drive actor as part of their six Cubelets. Many groups quickly recognized that they needed certain Cubelets to make their robot work the way they had envisioned. In Vignette 4, Madison lamented that her group had only one drive actor to push the pencils back into the cup. Later, she and Josh explained to Shara that they needed one more drive actor to help their robot balance and not tip over. Receiving another one, they were able to make a robot that succeeded in pushing the pencils (see the photo on the right side of Figure 2).
Josh and Madison watch as their robot bulldozer pushes the pencils toward the cup.
When defining their problem, Madison and Josh incorporated the pencil cup that was on their table. They decided that it would be a problem if the cup tipped over and all the pencils fell out. They determined that the solution would be to build a robot that pushed the pencils back into the cup. Interestingly, these children’s problem-identification and problem-solving process revealed that each time they recounted their problem, it constantly evolved. The following vignette shows how Madison and Josh later presented refined versions of their problem and solution to Eunji, who was assisting the class while video-recording this session:
Vignette 5
Madison explains, “The problem is, … we’re pretending this is a building.” Holding up the pencil cup and then setting it back down on the table, she continues, “and pencils in the building, somebody accidentally pushed the building over.” She demonstrates this by pushing the cup over and explains, “So the pencils dropped out and then … one of the Cubelets has wheels. So we’re gonna … make a robot, and it’s going to push the pencils out of the way.” After listening to all of this while looking intently at Madison, Josh adds on, “So pretend here’s a road.” He places his left hand flat on the table to the side of all of the pencils laying next to one another. “And the building tipped over,” he continues. He positions the pencil tips right next to the cup’s opening, like a big mouth ready to swallow them up, “And the pencils fell in the road,” he concludes.
In this vignette, Josh and Madison represented the pencil cup as a building that fell over and spilled pencils into the road. When talking to one of the enrichment class teachers, Tariana, their problem was further elaborated:
Vignette 6
Tariana asks, “Does it solve your problem?” Josh responds, “Yes, the building is toppled over. See that.” The pencils are in the cup, and he tilts it all over in front of the approaching robot. The robot hits the cup and, as it continues moving forward, it bulldozes the cup with the pencils still in it over to the left hand side. “So it pushes it out of the way,” Josh explains after they watch it. Madison chimes in, “Like … pretend my pencil was a school bus.” She puts one pencil with the point facing her. “And this big mess was right here,” she continues as she positions the pencil cup with the other pencils in it behind the lone pencil. Madison adds, “And cars … and busses couldn’t go by because it was a one-lane road and this was blocking the lane. So this pushed it out of the way.” The robot drives forward and bumps into the pencil cup pushing it along with it.
Yet, when the twins presented their robot to the class, their story evolved once again, as described below:
Vignette 7
Madison explains, “our problem was somebody came over with a bulldozer and knocked this cylinder pencil building down. And then the pencils fell out … but there was a car trying to get through. But the mess was too big because the road was only one lane. Josh, show us.” While Madison is explaining, Josh is restacking the Cubelets. As Madison finishes, Shara repeats, “So there’s a mess in the road and only one lane?” Madison responds, “Mm hmm.” Shara presses, “So you’re building a Cubelet robot to do what?” Josh responds, “Push it out of the way.” Madison adds on, “Yeah, to push the mess out of the way. That way the car can go through.” While Josh is still reconfiguring the robot, Tariana adds, “And it actually worked. I actually saw this one.”
As illustrated in the series of vignettes presented above, Josh and Madison’s problem emerged and evolved from common classroom items, pencils in a cup. Initially using the materials for a rather literal problem (i.e. the pencil cup falling over and the pencils falling out), over the course of the session, in explaining their problem to the teachers and to their classmates, and in experiencing the Cubelets bulldozing the pencils rather than inserting them into the cup, these children eventually represented the cup and the pencils as a mess in the one-lane road that needed to be moved out of the way. Whether intentionally presented or not, materials at and surrounding their tables influenced the kinds of problems and solutions the participating children were able to come up with.
Discussion
Findings of this study showed that the process of the participating children’s problem identification was dialogic and that the children reflected on issues and challenges they had experienced in their daily lives to define their problems. The findings also revealed how the children’s dialogue not only with peers and teachers but also with materials was critical to defining and refining a problem. These findings provide the following implications for the practice of early childhood education in general and of early childhood robotics education in particular.
First, the study discloses the great potential of early childhood robotics education to engage young children in STEM learning in a personally meaningful manner by encouraging them to identify and solve problems based on their lived experiences. Moreover, the fact that this study was conducted in a public, Title 1 elementary school helps appreciate how the instructional approach fostering children’s inquiry (Katz and Chard, 2000; Kilpatrick, 1918) through their problem finding (Rusk et al., 2008) and problem posing (Freire, 1970) is effective in making STEM accessible to students from diverse backgrounds. Robotics for young children is often exclusive; offered in university lab schools, summer camps, or afterschool programs (e.g. Bers, 2007; Lee et al., 2013) and not often in public school settings with children from low-income families. In particular, the study reveals how an instructional approach promoting collaborative problem posing facilitates the active participation of both boys and girls and children from different racial, linguistic, and socioeconomic backgrounds. Problem identification allows children to apply what they have learned about STEM to real-world scenarios while enabling teachers to assess and appreciate what students are capable of doing. As Rusk et al. (2008) suggest, problem finding is not something that is limited to a classroom environment but is an important real-life skill. Watching the video segment on the presentation of the twins’ problem and solution, illustrated in the section on material inspirations, the enrichment class teachers shared how they were impressed with the way these children identified a problem and designed a robot that could have real-life implications:
I just really thought that, out of all the problems that were created or brainstormed, I think theirs were one of the ones that were …
Most thought out?
Most thought out. … Madison and Josh probably would have won hands down, if we were having a contest. Because I could actually see … a real-life-
Project coming out of it.
You look at the news every day. You see all these trucks overturned, and it takes them hours … to clean the highway off.
Yeah! If there was just something that could just come and …, push the stuff out of the way.
The National Research Council (NRC) of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences developed a framework for K-12 science education and encouraged students’ participation in science and engineering practices by “asking questions and defining problems.” The framework emphasized: “For engineering, [students] should ask questions to define the problem to be solved and to elicit ideas that lead to the constraints and specifications for its solution” (NRC, 2012: 56). This study demonstrates that allowing children to identify and solve a problem based on their lived experiences is a promising way to engage them in engineering practices.
Second, despite its importance and benefit to children, identifying problems on their own may not be easy for young children with limited prior experience. The participating children needed opportunities to collaboratively brainstorm, define, and refine their problems with peers. As discussed in the “Methods” section, we offered the children two examples of problems to solve (e.g. protecting animals at night and helping a mail carrier push heavy packages) 1 week prior to encouraging them to come up with their own problems. This scaffolding may have assisted the children in developing a frame of reference before brainstorming possible problems with their peers. In his dialogism, Bakhtin (1981) reminded us how innovative ideas develop not necessarily from an individual’s private thoughts but from the person’s conversation with others. Through their dialogue with peers, the participating children appropriated both the examples of problems provided by our team and events from their lived experiences and peer culture for their “internally persuasive” (Bakhtin, 1981: 342) problem identification. Bakhtin argued: “The ideological becoming of a human being … is the process of selectively assimilating the words of others” (p. 341). The dialogic process of problem identification is critical for children to practice becoming engineers.
Considering that U.S. education policies in the past 20 years have emphasized children’s performance on standardized tests over their creative and critical thinking (Geist and Baum, 2005), we argue that consistent exposure to the opportunity to think about issues around them and identify problems and solutions on their own is critical to children’s development as thoughtful and critical-minded citizens. The participating children’s teachers shared:
Sometimes I think we don’t give students enough credit.
If they don’t pass the test, then you’re put into a category. Everything is graded on a test. Not as much as … the whole child.
I think that they need more opportunities to just solve problems on their own, instead of us telling them or giving them the information. You know, just give it to them and see how they do.
Yeah, to become their own problem solver, instead of asking “what’s the equation for this?”
But I think it’s about changing the mindset of teachers, allowing students to have those opportunities.
And I think it’s hard to make it … child-centered. Teachers have a hard time with [the] child-centered [approach].
These teachers acknowledged how students are categorized based on their performance on standardized tests and how such a practice often underestimates children’s capability. They saw the need to provide students with more opportunities to be able to identify and solve problems on their own in school. The teachers also recognized how this approach led by children’s inquiry requires changing teachers’ perspective of teaching, which reflects the dominance of teacher-directed instruction.
Finally, as many researchers argued (e.g. Dixon, 2001; Dresden and Lee, 2007; Helm and Gronlund, 2000; Schuler, 2000), the project- and inquiry-based pedagogy led by children’s questions allows teachers to meet many required standards while providing children with engaging activities. In particular, the robotics education program encouraging children’s problem identification and problem solving is aligned with the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics (National Governors Association Center for Best Practice and Council of Chief State School Officers, 2010) and the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS Lead States, 2013). The participating children’s teachers noticed this alignment with the standards.
(Looking at Jodi) You know, I guess it’s similar to the way that you all are teaching math now.
Yes, right.
[You]’re giving them … a problem and you’re not giving them any strategies to solve that problem. You’re just trying to see, “Okay … how did you solve that problem?” (Pretending to be a child) “Oh, well I did this, this, this, …”
And that’s the other thing with Common Core, everything now [students] have to explain. So that would be really good to carry on into your [robotics education program] where [children] have to write a written explanation of what they learned, it makes them verbalize it.
In the above transcript, the teachers appreciated our approach to encouraging children to explore their own solutions, record their inquiry processes in their Engineer Logs, and present their project to classmates and teachers. As these teachers recognized, the children’s project- and inquiry-based approach is complementary, rather than contradictory, to state mandated curricula (Katz and Chard, 2000).
Besides, the study demonstrates how robotics education can go beyond STEM by incorporating other domains. For example, reading directions to understand the day’s task; negotiating ideas with one another; recording plans, observations, and conclusions in logs; and presenting the ideas to teachers and classmates promote children’s development of literacy, language arts, and communication skills. Types of problems identified by children (e.g. debris in the road and bullies) provide them with opportunities to engage in social studies and civic education by exploring “their understandings of significant phenomena around them” (Katz and Chard, 2000: 28). Building robots with robotic manipulatives and with other materials (e.g. recycled items) also allows students to integrate arts into their scientific inquiry and engineering design. Rusk et al. (2008) suggested that providing children with a wide range of craft and recycled materials opens up more possibilities for their innovative creation. Although our students were not given additional craft materials, they used the limited materials presented to them in creative ways, as Madison and Josh used their pencil cup. Again, the children’s problem identification and problem solving were inspired by materials surrounding them. We believe that helping children make a conscious decision to design the most effective and efficient solution by considering their material constraints is a useful way to engage them in engineering practices.
Footnotes
Authors’ note
An earlier version of this article was presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association in Washington, DC, in April 2017.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.