Adventures in K-5 STEM Outreach Using the NAO Robot (Abstract Only)

The humanoid NAO robot continues to win both hearts and imaginations with its lifelike appearance and behaviors. Its consistent growth in popularity, an increasing wealth of free behaviors, and the intuitive Choregraphe development environment provide educators and developers with exceptional opportunities to motivate interest in STEM disciplines and breach impediments such as perceptions that such technology is simply too hard. In this poster, the authors discuss a variety of experimental uses of the NAO robots for K-5 STEM Outreach. Initial development and demonstrations focused on generating enthusiasm for both robotics and programming. Dancing and exercising behaviors from Notre Dame University's F.U.N. Lab and Aldebaran Robots easily integrated into voice-controlled Choregraphe demonstration scripts. Faculty and undergraduate students directed this enthusiasm to motivate engagement in Hour of Code programming activities. The team also utilized the NAO robots in small group settings within a K-5 Response To Intervention (RTI) program where demonstrations were followed by having the children interactively experiment with the robots stimulating imagination, creativity, curiosity, and problem solving skills as well as confidence and self-esteem. Next the RTI children actually programmed the robots using a story-based methodology and the powerful while intuitive building block programming constructs of Choregraphe. The team's on-going development efforts focus on expanding the repertoire of available behaviors to include interactive math games and foreign language educational dialogs. Results from use of these new behaviors will be presented at the SIGCSE Symposium. The team is also working to measure attitudinal, conceptual understanding, and math and language skills improvements.