The purpose of this study was to explore the perceived sense of comfort and belonging of girl participants, aged 15-16, engaged within a school-based offering of the Marine Education Advanced Education (MATE) underwater remotely operated vehicle (ROV) program (MATE-ROV). MATE-ROV is a competition-based educational robotics (ER) program that can…

Engineering career interest, especially that of young women, declines as they approach high-school graduation. We used expectancy-value theory, which emphasizes expectations for success and subjective value of experiences as antecedent factors to choice, as a framework for investigating new 9th grade soft robot design lessons. Compared to…

This article considers student analogical reasoning associated with learning practice in creating bio-inspired robots. The study was in the framework of an outreach course for middle school students. Fifty eighth and ninth graders performed inquiries into behavior and locomotion of snakes and designed robotic models using the BIOLOID robot…

One of the challenges of educating adolescents with autism spectrum disorders is to find activities that are interesting and engaging. Researchers have shown that adolescents with autism often are attracted to technology. Using an exploratory research method, the experiences of three students with autism who participated in after school robotics…

Educational Robotics (ER) has emerged as one of the tools to improve STEM learning in primary education if students are properly instructed. However, there is a lack of studies that guide teachers on which type of instruction should be used for ER in STEM between direct (DI) and indirect instruction (II). As a result, the present study aims to…

Robotics competitions for K-12 students are popular, but are students really learning and improving their STEM scores through robotics competitions? If not, why not? If they are, how much more effective is learning through competitions than traditional classes? Is there room for improvement? What is the best robotics competition model to maximize…

While today's schools in several countries, like Canada, are about to bring back programming to their curricula, a new conceptual angle, namely one of computational thinking, draws attention of researchers. In order to understand the articulation between computational thinking tasks in one side, student's targeted skills, and the types of problems…

This paper presents the results of a partnership between a New Jersey school district and four-year university seeking to enhance STEM programming for the district's diverse student population. The project utilized a STEM-focused experiential unit integrated into existing ninth grade school non-science classes (social studies and career readiness…

This study aims to explore an educational learning environment that supports students to learn conceptual modelling with the unified modelling language (UML). In this study, we call the describing models "UML programming." In this paper, we show an educational UML programming environment for science, technology, engineering, art, and…

This study explores the characteristics of after-school program activities at a charter school in the Southeast US highlighting students' experiences with and gains from these after-school program activities. A qualitative case study design was employed to understand students' views and opinions regarding the activities and their learning…