Family Camp, Lightning Storms, and Eagle Relatives: How Family Stories Bring Significance to Robotics Learning

• In Event: 47.073 - Weaving Stories Into STEM Learning

Abstract

Subject: In this paper, we share findings from an equity-focused family workshop that contextualizes robotics learning within family storytelling. Recent studies around engaging youth in robotics have focused on the ways in which teamwork, problem solving, understanding of STEM concepts, and identification with technology-related fields all increase as youth engage in robotics learning (c.f. Nourbakhsh, et al, 2005). However, studies also point to concerns around how to broaden robotics pedagogy outside the range of normative practices acceptable within the domain (Vossoughi, et al, 2016).

Framing: In this project, we center robotics learning within the context of stories that families find to be meaningful in an attempt to focus on learners as cultural, historical, and political actors (Vossoughi, et al, 2016). We analyze the educational, cultural, and sociopolitical work that stories do to both convey cultural knowledge and beliefs (Archibald, 2008) as well as frame the purpose for engaging in engineering learning. We take seriously the need to tightly interconnect learning that occurs across settings, knowing that “learning is facilitated when the cultural, socio-economic, and historical contexts of learners are recognized, respected, and responded to” (Authors, et al, 2007, p. 25). In this study we ask the question: how can family stories (and the multiple knowledge systems they encompass) come to intersect with robotics learning, and what do families learn about robotics, design, computer programming, and themselves?

Design: Data comes from a larger project that involves a large urban library system, Native American youth development organizations, a science center, and a university to form a model of decentralized informal science education. Families met once a week for five weeks to use robotics to design a diorama that depicted one scene from their family story.

Data includes video recordings of family engagement during each weekly session, exit surveys from each session, and pre/post family interviews.

Findings: Analysis of family engagement during the workshops indicates that program elements served as identity resources (Nasir & Cooks, 2009) for families to imagine their stories through robotics. As families build their story-based dioramas, the robotics materials (LED lights, motors, etc) semiotically take on new family and cultural meanings within the context of memories and cultural teachings (Authors, 2018). These stories helped provide a context in which persistence in trying tasks became meaningfully motivated towards authentic and valued ends. The stories provided important contexts in which robotics and aesthetics intersected to convey cultural meanings that were important to the family. Collectively, these findings help to reimagine how to design intergenerational STEM learning that support non dominant youth and adults in imagining new possible futures for themselves.

Significance: With policy initiatives focused on incorporating engineering into science education, there are significant gaps about how to realize this vision in a way that invite non dominant learners to see themselves in the engineering they engage in. This study shows that pedagogy and the design of robotics-inspired learning environments need to systematically work to push against boundaries of normative practices and tap into the repertoires of practice of nondominant learners.

Authors

• Carrie T. Tzou, University of Washington - Bothell

• Philip L. Bell, University of Washington

• Megan Bang, The Spencer Foundation

• Meixi Ng, University of Washington

• Enrique (Henry) Suarez, University of Washington - Seattle

• Don LaBonte, University of Washington - Seattle