Robotics Olympiad Research Articles

Gender disparity in STEM education: a survey research on girl participants in World Robot Olympiad.

Robotics competitions boosts the development of STEM education, but gender disparity in this field remains rarely addressed by researchers. This study focused on the World Robot Olympiad (WRO) and tried to explore the gender differences through investigation method. The research questions are as follows: RQ1, what is the tendency of girls' participation in WRO from 2015 to 2019 in terms of the four competition categories and three age groups? RQ2, what advantages and challenges do the all-girl teams have from the perspectives of parents, coaches and students? The results showed that among the 5956 participants in the 2015-2019 WRO finals, girls accounted for only 17.3%. The Open Category that emphasized creativity attracted relatively more girl participants. As age group moved up, the number of girl participants decreased. The qualitative results showed that the focuses of coaches, parents and students was not exactly the same. All-girl team have the advantages in their communication, presentation and collaboration skills but less good at robot building. The results indicated the importance of promoting girl's participation in robot competitions and STEM fields. Coaches, mentors and parents need to provide girls with more support and encouragement in learning STEM subjects, especially at the junior high school level. Organizers of related competitions should give girls more exposure and opportunities by adjusting the mechanism.

Development and validation of a questionnaire for assessing perspectives of World Robot Olympiad on participants

Many studies have examined the effects of robotics competitions, but few have investigated their effects on participants, especially from the perspectives of students, parents, and coaches. The researchers of this study developed and validated an instrument for exploring the impact of the World Robot Olympiad (WRO), a major international robotics competition, on participants from the perspectives of students, parents, and coaches. Through a literature review and expert discussion, the researchers proposed the first version of the questionnaire. After three years of data collection and three iterations as well as a reliability and validity analysis, factor analysis, and expert review, researchers developed an impact questionnaire for participants in WRO, which included 18 items in the following six dimensions: Learning Skill, Engineering Thinking, Emotional Engagement, Career Choice, Cooperative Solution, and Global Consciousness. Data from 636 valid responses revealed that the questionnaire has good reliability and validity and that students, parents, and coaches all highly valued the positive impact of WRO in 2019. Data analysis indicated that, by and large, students’ abilities have improved in various dimensions which were similar to those of previous research on robotics education and robotics competitions.

Impact of participation in the World Robot Olympiad on K-12 robotics education from the coach's perspective

<p style="text-indent:20px;">The integration of robotics education with science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education has a great potential in future education. In recent years, numerous countries have hosted robotic competitions. This study uses a mixed research method to explore the coaches' views on student participation in the World Robot Olympiad (WRO) by incorporating the questionnaire surveys and interviews conducted at the 2019 WRO finals in Hungary. By quantitative and qualitative analyses, coaches generally agreed that participation in the WRO improved students' STEM learning skills and cultivated their patience and resilience in handling challenging tasks.</p>

Effects of the world robot Olympiad on the students who participate: a qualitative study

ABSTRACT Educational robots have been widely used in STEM education because they are operable and programmable. Robotics competitions for primary- and secondary-school students are becoming increasingly popular. The World Robot Olympiad (WRO) is an international robotics competition; each group of participants builds a robot with LEGO based on a challenge proposed by the WRO. In this study, the researchers interviewed 47 participants (19 parents, 17 students, and 11 coaches), and analysed interview data using NVivo 11.0 to explore the effect of the WRO from three perspectives. Overall, the experience of the WRO had a positive impact on students’ capability enhancement, emotional engagement, and school learning, such as through improving their communication, teamwork, thinking, and problem-solving skills, as well as their self-confidence and robot knowledge. However, the three groups had different priorities based on their participation. The students paid more attention to their own development in the competition and cooperation with the team. Parents focused more on the comprehensive development of students and impact of the competition on their school learning and future. The coaches attached greater importance to communication among team members, which is mainly focused on emotional engagement and capability enhancement. These findings have numerous implications for robotics education.

The experience of implementing the Intercollegiate Educational Robotics Olympiad within the framework of the Training of Trainers in Vulnerable Areas Project in Costa Rica

This article presents the experience of conducting the Intercollegiate Robotics Olympiad in 2017, as a result of the implementation of the project of the School of Computing of the National University of Costa Rica (UNA), called Trainers in Robotics for Colleges in Vulnerable Areas, which is developed jointly with the Costa Rican Institute of Drugs (ICD) and the Ministry of Public Education (MEP). In addition, the challenges developed by the executors of the project and the results obtained by the benefited students who participated in this event are announced. This is an inter-institutional project of Costa Rica, which is aimed at preparing instructors in the area of robotics at the secondary level, so that they can train their students in vulnerable regions of Costa Rica. In order to give their students the opportunity to occupy their free time in positive activities.

EducAval: Towards Assessment of Educational Robotics Softwares

The main goal is to perform an analysis of Educational Robotics softwares. For that, a simple, practical and reproducible approach for assessment named EducAval has been devised, which is also introduced. The key contribution is the proposal of some homogeneous and universal criteria for software evaluation in this area. Basically, simple assessment steps are followed including survey application and data collection and analysis, with specific questions about didatic and technical issues that are formulated separately for professors and students. After questionary application, data are collected and mapped into verification, qualification, and validation parameters. This strategy makes it simpler to evaluate some Educational Robotics software verifying if they attend the requirements of the users and if they can be used as well by schools or other Institutions interested in the application of such methodology. Softwares used in the finals of Brazilian Robotics Olympiad have been verified, qualified, and validated using this methodology and the results are presented.

Developing and Validating a High School Version of the Robotics Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire

Robotics has become a crucial domain in technology education, helping students to improve their abilities in assembly and programming. Despite the considerable research that has gone into the learning performance associated with robotics, little work has been done on the cognitive processes involved in learning this subject. The purpose of this study was to develop an instrument (based on the theoretical framework of MSLQ), with which to evaluate the motivation of high school students to learn robotics and the strategies they employ. Fifty participants in the open category competition of the World Robot Olympiad 2010 completed the self-reported questionnaire (RMSLQ-HS). Thirteen factors and fifty one items were extracted using exploratory factor analysis. Implications for the educational application of robotics and research suggestions related to RMSLQ are also discussed.

Brazilian Robotics Olympiad

This article introduces the successful methodology adopted for the realization of the Brazilian Robotics Olympiad. Organizational and scientific issues are presented and discussed as well as results of statistical surveys performed with participants that verify the benefits brought by this robotics Olympiad. The Brazilian Robotics Olympiad is a nine-year-old nation-wide initiative created with the mission of promoting robotics among Brazilian students with or without previous knowledge of robotics, fostering their interest to engage in science, technology and engineering studies and careers. The Olympiad is fully free for participants, being annually organized by hundreds of volunteers from several Brazilian universities. It is divided into practical and theoretical components with several levels, each one designed for a certain student age. More than 300,000 students have already participated in the Brazilian Robotics Olympiad and, according to 58% of these students, the Brazilian Robotics Olympiad helped them to decide which university course to pursue.

Why it is harder to run RoboCup in South Africa

Robots are widely used as a vehicle to spark interest in science and technology in learners. A number of initiatives focus on this issue, for instance, the Roberta Initiative, the FIRST Lego League, the World Robot Olympiad and RoboCup Junior. Robotic competitions are valuable not only for school learners but also for university students, as the RoboCup initiative shows. Besides technical skills, the students get some project exposure and experience what it means to finish their tasks on time. But qualifying students for future high-tech areas should not only be for students from developed countries. In this article, we present our experiences with research and education in robotics within the RoboCup initiative, in Germany and South Africa; we report on our experiences with trying to get the RoboCup initiative in South Africa going. RoboCup has a huge support base of academic institutions in Germany; this is not the case in South Africa. We present our ‘north–south’ collaboration initiatives in RoboCup between Germany and South Africa and discuss some of the reasons why we think it is harder to run RoboCup in South Africa.

Results and Outlooks of Robot Education in Republic of Korea

Approximately one century has passed since a Czech dramatist Capek Karel used a word “robot” for the first time in his satirical work “Rosumovi Univerzální Roboti (Rossum's Universal Robots)” in 1921. Indeed, the existence of a robot started with a literary imagination, when the word was used for the first time about one century ago, but the rot becomes an entity inseparable from human life, including housework and even nursing, in the contemporary society. Today, we have come to see intelligent robots going so far as not only to think and move of their own accord, but also revealing their feelings on their faces. That kind of robots is represented by ASIMO developed in 1980 by Honda in Japan, KISMET developed in the late 1990s by MIT in America, and HUBO developed in 2004 by KAIST in South Korea. Like this, robot research is currently led by Japan, the United States and the Republic of Korea. This presentation is about the robot education system currently implemented from elementary through high schools, the education results and the future prospects in South Korea. On the whole, robot education begins at college levels in America and Japan, but it is made in a systematic way after regular curricular activities at elementary schools in the Republic of Korea. In addition, more than 1000 private institutes for robot education are driving a booming trade and numerous robot competitions, including the International Robot Olympiad (IRO), are held in South Korea. Therefore, not only is the Republic of Korea expected to take the advantageous position first in the future robot education market, but the current robot education system in South Korea will be able to be a good guide for that which will be carried out throughout the world in a few years in the future.

Attracting Students to the Computing Disciplines: A Case Study of a Robotics Contest

Guiding high school students towards a specific career choice is one of the challenges that parents, teachers, and career- counselors alike have to participate in with a lot of involvement. While career-fairs, open-houses, and other such activities from universities play an important role in attracting students to specific programs, it has been felt over the years that students tend to choose relatively easy majors and avoid computing and similar disciplines due to the involvement of programming and mathematics. This trend has affected Computer Science programs throughout the world in different proportions. In this paper we would like to share our experiences with an effort to make high school students more aware of the computing disciplines by involving them in doing something that belongs to the core of this discipline, i.e., developing correct logic and computational infrastructure, in a friendly and fun way. One well established fact is that if these young minds are motivated to go for higher education in computing, engineering or STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics)-based programs of study, they can find their own path and would know it better as to what would be a better line of career for them. The presented experiences are related to a set of “Computing Contests” that the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at Qatar University has been holding for the past five years. Initially, it was designed as a website design contest, but after a couple of years’ experience, the interest was observed to be declining. The contest theme was then changed to robotics using the LEGO Mindstorms’ NXT kits and giving simple challenges to the students in which the emphasis was on developing robust logic for computational implementation. Unlike the existing robotic contests in the region, including First LEGO League (FLL), National Robotics Olympiad (NRO), and Bot-Ball, the actual contest track was unknown to the participants until the contest day. This implied that the robots were to be programmed for certain general rules while the actual implementation sequence of the rules was not known. In fact, the emphasis was not given to the mechanical design but on generic sensory-perception based actuation mechanism that was to be programmed in order to solve the given challenge in minimum time.The paper presents results that show a positive change of trend from the schools’ side that reflects the interest taken by the schools, their participation, level of work performed, and what benefits were achieved by the students and their schools. The findings are presented in this paper using quantitative as well as qualitative data and shows that the robotics contests were successful in motivating students to make the computing domain as their major for university studies as well as in making them learn some of the most beneficial skills needed in the engineering and computing programs; objective programming, and outcome-based system design.

Robot contest as a laboratory for experiential engineering education

By designing, building, and operating autonomous robots students learn key engineering subjects and develop systems-thinking, problem-solving, and teamwork skills. Such events as the Trinity College Fire-Fighting Home Robot Contest (TCFFHRC) offer rich opportunities for students to apply their skills by requiring design, and implementation of autonomous robots that are tested during competition. Started in 2003, the TCFFHRC Robotics Olympiad offers junior-high and high school students, working alone or in teams, to demonstrate their knowledge by taking a challenging 50-minute written examination in four key areas related to robotics: mechanics, sensors, software, and electronics. The Olympiad comprises a second evaluation medium that supplements a regular contest survey, which has been in place since 1999. The contest survey solicits information about motivation and progress in subject areas from all contest participants--a large and diverse group that includes junior-high and high school students, working engineers, university students, and team supervisors/guides. As a further evaluation step, we have conducted supplementary case studies of courses and curricula at Trinity College and at the Technion. Assessment indicates that the TCFFHRC has achieved its primary goal: to foster and improve robotics education on an international scale.