Educational Robotics: Tracing the process of learning about technology

This exhibit traces the process of learning about technology through educational robotics, as experienced by New York City kids during the spring and summer of 2004. We follow 3 groups of kids:

* High school students from Stuyvesant high school who built dancing and soccer-playing robots to compete in a competition called RoboCup Junior (rcj) which was held in Boston in early may.

* Elementary school students from the School at Columbia who spent a week in June learning about robots and documenting their experiences.

* High school students from around the city who participated in a summer program at Barnard College called Science and Technology Entry Program (step) and programmed robots for a (simulated) environmental clean-up task.

Mentors for each of these projects came from the Agents Lab in the Computer Science Department at Columbia University. The mentors were undergraduate, graduate and postdoc students in Computer Science, Engineering, and Education who take an interest in helping kids learn about and understand technology through hands-on experiences with robotics. These projects are made possible through grants from The National Science Foundation (NSF) and The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).

More projects like these continue on an on-going basis. Information can be obtained by reading about our Technology Integration Partnershp (TIP) program at Columbia, funded by the NSF.