Hi Barbara, thanks for viewing our video and raising these great questions! 

So 6 students worked in 2 groups of three during the summer. Each group has one novice, one intermediate, and one expert in terms of coding experience. They were all rising seniors last summer except for one who just graduated high school. They did work together with a particular physics teacher, and that teacher played as a facilitator's role in helping the students coming up with the lesson plan. During this year's classroom implementation, this teacher, along with three other physics teachers, participated in the program. Since the lab developed by students over the summer is pretty straight forward, all teachers were just playing an supporting role and making sure that students were doing the lab.  

To your second question, by "standard science curriculum", we meant that the physics concepts (e.g., energy, friction, etc) involved in the labs were all within NGSS and were the ones that have being taught in the high school. We were not adding new content to the existing curriculum, but teaching the concepts in a different way with the robots. 

Hi Courtney, 

Thank you for your questions! The way we addressed the issue of losing valuable instruction time for content learning is to integrate content learning with coding. The students completed science labs that covered concepts that high school physics is required to cover (such as force and motion) and integrated coding. That way teachers did not have to compromise losing content over including coding. 

Thank you for the response! I think developing school leaders' and teachers' understanding of how coding can be integrated into the content (and enhance the content of) the instruction they already are providing will be so critical to ensuring all students have access to coding and computational thinking/computer science instruction. Good luck with your work!

Hi Kelly,

Thanks for watching out video!

We had teacher PD (2 sessions) in the fall before going into classroom implementation, where we asked the teachers to follow through the labs created by students from summer and see if those made sense and fit with their lesson plans. I'm glad that you mentioned culturally responsive practices. One thing we were trying to do is to break through the barrier for programming and make it newcomer friendly by using block-based coding instead of traditional script-based coding.

Besides classroom observational data, we had some questions on scientific concepts attached to the lab sheet we gave out to students and also conducted interviews that focused on students' understanding and engagement. 

Hi Alka, 

Thank you for your questions and your suggestions! They are super helpful! Teachers had professional development over 2 days during which they learned how to use the coding software, how to program code to control the robots, and then learned about the labs that the students had created. They carried out the labs themselves and also provided feedback and made modifications that were necessary to implement the lab in their classrooms. In our study, most of the designing was carried out by students. The teachers made sure what the students had designed would be applicable in their classrooms. 

Please let me know if this answers your questions. 

Thanks! 

Thank you for answering my questions. :)

Hi Timothy, 

1) The novice didn't "learn" to code as much as getting experience and being exposed to coding. They were provided with a coding template that they modified and manipulated to complete the experiment. Future studies will examine the integration of coding and robotics over multiple experiments and to provide more consistent exposure to the tools and the coding. 

2) None of the physics teachers had high levels of coding proficiency. Students in the summer internship created the code for the experiments that were implemented. When the labs were implemented during the school day, researchers were present to provide any technical support that that the teacher and students needed (after they had originally tried to solve the issue themselves). In future studies, we hope to further examine the kinds of tools and training teachers need to implement the electronic tools in their classrooms more independently. 

Please let me know if this doesn't answer your questions. 

Hi Chris,

For example, in the traditional friction lab, it is very hard to move the block at a constant speed by hand. However, with the robot, we can easily program it to move forward at a constant speed to drive the block. This will give us a more accurate results for the experiment. 

Hope this helps! 

So is there a force probe attached to the robot?

Hi Chris,

There is not a force probe attached. Instead, we attached a traditional spring scale to the robot which is then attached to the block.  The students had to read the spring scale as the robot was pulling the block against several different surfaces.