Preservice teachers greatly benefit from learning how to use and integrate innovative robotics to enhance their teaching skills. They are eager to engage in courses that use robotics to prepare them for their future classrooms. Teaching preservice teachers, I find that some of my favorite classes—and those most captivating and useful for my students—are the classes that include teaching with robotics.
Robotics are great for teaching topics such as coding and the engineering design process. However, when new teachers work on incorporating robotics in the classroom, they also practice important skills including differentiating instruction, tackling multiple standards in a single project, securing their own classroom funding, and more. Practice with robotics is essential preparation for teaching STEM subjects, but it can also offer lessons that are helpful far beyond the science and engineering topics.
Addressing Multiple Standards
Even in the best of times, most elementary teachers are stretched thin, with too much to teach and too little time to do it in. Elementary educators can’t teach robotics in isolation. They simply don’t have time. They do have time, however, to teach robotics lessons that also address literacy, art, social studies, science, and math standards.
I often use a robot called KIBO to integrate coding into a variety of cross-curricular lessons. For example, students can build dragons out of craft paper, attach them to KIBO’s platform, and code the robot to dance as part of a celebration of the Chinese New Year. I’ve also had my preservice teachers decorate their robots as boats and then program them to follow the routes of famous explorers that creates a fun way to model teaching key social studies standards.
One of my favorite lessons combines life science and coding to answer the question “How do animals survive in the winter?” Students decorate their robots as winter animals, such as arctic foxes or polar bears. The class discusses what food and shelter their particular animal needs to survive a cold winter, then students create a model shelter using paper to make a dome where their “animal” can sleep. Then students create a sequence and program their robots to scoop up the model food they created out of paper and bring it to their shelter. I set a timer, with the idea that the animals need to bring food inside their domes within a certain amount of time before they “freeze.” Modeling lessons like this with preservice teachers shows preservice teachers how to add hands-on robotics to address the national Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) for their future students.
Hands-on projects like these incorporate many different kinds of learning, so I always ask preservice teachers to look back whenever they’ve finished a project and identify the different standards and practices they used, which may include ISTE technology standards, science and engineering practices, cross-cutting concepts, computational thinking, and disciplinary core ideas to name a few.
Demystifying STEM Teaching
One of my favorite reasons why working with preservice teachers and robotics is so important is that robotics make it so easy to model many best practices for the classroom. Modeling is an excellent teaching tactic, but it’s also a powerful tool for demystifying the teaching of STEM.
Preservice teachers decide to become teachers for a variety of reasons, but a desire to share a love of STEM topics is only at the top of the list for a few. In fact, many preservice teachers, especially those who want to teach elementary students, feel a great deal of anxiety about teaching STEM.
The idea of engaging students in critical thinking, problem-solving, and the engineering design process can feel incredibly intimidating to preservice teachers who feel they don’t have technical skills or a strong background in the sciences. When I give preservice teachers a robot and an assignment to complete with it, they suddenly see that, when they have something hands-on that they can test and experiment with, STEM actually becomes deeply engaging—and even fun and exciting.
There is no better way to help a preservice teacher get excited about STEM than to put them in the role of a student, give them a robot, and then watch them have a blast solving a problem and completing a challenge.
Learning to Secure Classroom Funds
Many of the preservice teachers who take my classes will end up in schools that may not have robotics or the funds to purchase them. As a result, many of my students might be challenged with the prospect of initiating funding for their school.
To help out my students, each semester I spend time teaching how to secure funding, how to write grants, and even how to fight for these kinds of resources within their school or district. How to get the materials they might need for any class is a vitally important lesson for teachers to learn.
How to Differentiate Instruction
Robotics are also perfect tools for practicing differentiation for students. They come in varying complexities and durabilities. In addition to KIBO, I use other robots such as Dash, Ozobots, and Robot Mouse with preservice teachers. One question I always ask my classes whenever I introduce a new type of robotics is how they would use it differently to teach a variety of different grade levels. Some robotics are more durable, making them better suited to younger children, while some take more fine motor skills, suggesting they would work better in a classroom of older students. Preservice teachers always need to have in mind the developmental abilities of the audience for their instruction.
My classes also address the ways the same robotics can be used to address different concepts, subjects, and standards in different grade levels. For example, KIBO has a robot arm that throws objects which is great for teaching forces and motion (a standard that is addressed in NGSS for grade 3) and is also useful for teaching energy, force, and collisions, all of which are a part of the grade 4 NGSS.
Teaching with Passion
Working in pairs or teams of three, the preservice teachers in my classes experience-first hand the challenges and benefits around collaboration and robotics. Collaborating with other preservice teachers gives them a head start in understanding the conflicts and other sticking points their students might encounter when they share robotics, or work in teams on any project, in their future classrooms.
Will there be an argument about who gets to use an important piece like a motor? Will there be a disagreement about the initial design? Moments like these can lead to challenges, but they can also be important learning opportunities. Practicing collaborating in teams with robotics, preservice teachers will learn how to make these conflicts learning opportunities rather than distractions.
Using robotics to elicit excitement, engagement, and motivation to learn gives preservice teachers the tools they need to succeed in their future classrooms. My goal is for these preservice teachers to begin their careers with the understanding and confidence to try new things and learn that if they are passionate about what they are teaching, they can use these important teaching skills to create lessons for any subject that produce the same enthusiasm, collaboration, and engagement they felt when they were using robotics in my class.
Katherine Blagden, previously an elementary STEM educator, received a Masters in Science Education and is currently teaching at Roger Williams University while pursuing a PhD in Education. She can be reached at katherine.blagden@gmail.com.
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