Department of Engineering

 
Department of Mathematics

Department of Psychology

Department of Exercise and Sport Science 

Project Goals and Objectives

The overarching goals of the academy are to broaden teachers’ perspectives on IT tools in biomechanics and robotics and provide experiences that help develop inquiry based science and mathematics lessons that stimulate students’ interests in science, engineering, and technology. To meet these goals, the following objectives are noted for the academy:

• Objective #1: Provide two cohorts of 30 science and mathematics teachers and guidance counselors (60 total) from 20 rural high schools with biomechanics and robotics activities during a 2 week Information Technology Academy for Teachers.
•  Objective#2: Provide three cohorts of 60 students (180 total) with biomechanics and robotics activities during a three week Information Technology Academy for Students. Establish the IT Academy for Students activities as an opportunity for teachers to field-test lesson plans developed during their preceding IT Academy for Teachers.
• Objective #3: Leverage faculty expertise as content resources to help teachers use biomechanics and robotics explorations to develop lesson plans for the spatial sense, measurement, and geometry units required for high school Advanced Mathematics and Geometry. Continue support throughout the school year via implementation visits by University faculty and students (graduate and undergraduate).
• Objective #4: Collaborate with the community agencies to host a Parents Teachers Symposium on IT so that parents in rural communities can broaden their perspectives on Information Technology literacy and as a result recognize important links between their expectations and the school performance and careers goals of their children.

The work with robots is grounded in the belief that students learn best when they are engaged in active exploration, interpretation, and construction of ideas. In designing and developing the classroom activities for the BS2 equipped robot, teachers will apply a “Design – Build – Test – Play” approach for constructing the drive chain, the chassis, and the control system for the robot. The goal is to program the robot to react to obstacles detected by the whiskers and alter its path to avoid the obstacle. In helping teachers reshape their classrooms with these tools, In helping teachers connect the robotics design and BS2 programming explorations to students’ career interests, a Design Documentation framework has been adopted to help teachers guide inquiry. This six element approach provides a means for teachers to apply a cognitive apprenticeship approach that embeds control and heuristic strategies for learning and communicating information into sustained tasks that are meaningful to students. At participating schools, the Information Technology – Programming & Software Engineering track of the Career Pathways initiative will be used to cluster mathematics (Algebra II, Geometry, and Technical Mathematics), Physical Science, and Computer Applications courses into an integrated curriculum that helps students acquire research, technology, and collaborative skills.

Robotics contexts for mathematics and science: The BS2 programming activities has been developed to help teachers transform Mathematics, Physical Science, and Computer Applications courses associated with the IT Programming & Software Engineering track of the Career Pathways program. The goal is to help teachers use timing diagrams to help students explore how software engineers develop programs to condition high voltage (Vdd = 5 V) signals and low voltage (Vss = 0V) signals to fluctuate with time. During explorations, teachers will program the processor to blink light emitting diodes (LED) and send high and low signals to control the robot’s servo motors. Timing diagrams will allow teachers to help students discover how computers control machines and how periodic functions emerge from algorithms programmed into the microprocessor. Such programs will involve PBASIC commands that change the time duration for Pin arguments. These Pin arguments are numbers between 0 and 15 that tells the BASIC Stamp2 processor which input/ output (I/O) pin to connect to Vdd (HIGH) or Vss (LOW) voltages. In extending these explorations to science lessons involving Newton’s Laws, teachers will explore strategies for using software tools to model phenomena such as the effects of forces on bodies.

The approach is to help teachers find ways to motivate students to discover relationships between dependent and independent variables and broaden their perspectives on software tools like MatLab. The aim here is to provide teachers with IT tools for their students to create array structures and manipulate large sets of data, investigate trends, and visualize results. One such equation, predicts the maximum height achieved when objects like ping-pong balls are thrown by the robot at a speed (v) and angle to the horizontal.