This past summer the Project Grad Office in the San Fernando Valley offered a
summer program to 200 at-risk students in the
. The summer program was funded through a Department of Education
Gear-Up grant. Gear-Up grants are intended to increase the number of minority
students in colleges and universities. The purpose of the project is to follow a
group of at-risk students (students at risk of dropping out of high school for
socio-economic reasons) from 7th grade through 12th grade in hopes of getting
them into colleges and universities. This summer was the second summer of the
program. The students were rising 8th graders.
is part of the Los Angeles
Unified School District (LAUSD) the second largest school district in the
country. The project focused on 3 middle schools in the
,
,
, and
. All
these schools feed into
. The
’s population is
overwhelmingly Hispanic. The high school dropout rate in this area exceeds 50%.
Roy Romer the former superintendent of the school district maintained that the
primary cause of the high dropout rate is Algebra.
Algebra is a gatekeeper course. Students must pass Algebra to graduate from
high school. All 8th grade students are expected to take Algebra. Most fail in
8th grade. They are allowed to repeat the course in high school but most
students do not fair much better there. If they fail in high school they often
drop out. One of the reasons that students do so poorly in algebra is that they
do not understand its relevance. In a study in
only 15% of students surveyed felt that Algebra was relevant to
their lives. This is not surprising in light of the way that algebra is taught
using x’s and y’s instead of real variables. Homework in algebra classes often
consists of pages of abstract problems that use abstract algorithms to solve
them. Only rarely are the problems related to real world problems. It is not
surprising that students do not understand why Algebra is relevant to their
future lives or careers.
Furthermore, educators understand that learning takes effort and is
voluntary. Students do not learn because they are put in a certain room or a
teacher uses a special teaching tool. Students have to engage in the class. The
best activities are ones that are “hard fun” as Negroponte coined it (Being
Digital, 1996). Hard fun is an activity that requires a great deal of thinking
effort. Nevertheless, the student is willing to put forth the effort because the
activity is so much fun. Video games are often used as examples of this type of
hard fun. Youngsters can spend hour upon hour playing video games. They lose the
games every time they play, until they finally beat the machine. Beating the
machine can take weeks and months of hard concentration. Yet they will put forth
the effort because the process is so much fun. Finding activities that are
engaging brings about a creative focus known as “Flow.” If a student experiences
flow they are completely focused and extremely productive. Creative people are
particularly adept at finding ways to produce this state in themselves (Mihaly
Csikszentmihalyi, Flow, 2002). Flow produces creative solutions and wonderful
outcomes. Flow leads to innovation. Innovation has been identified recently as
the “one last sustainable edge” the has in the global economy.
Robotics is a school activity that has potential to create focused learning,
hard fun, and flow. Currently there are over 100,000 students participating in
robotics competitions around the country (Robot, 2007). Research on FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology)
Robotics Competitions from Brandeis University has shown that the teacher
coaches believe that students really enjoy putting robots together, and learn a
great deal of science, math, technology and engineering along the way. Seymour
Pappert recognized this same interest in students using robots in the 1980s. His
book Mindstorms (1993) is the result of his research. He further found that
robots and computers often make abstract concepts concrete and more accessible
to younger students.
Armed with this understanding of education and concerned about the high
school dropout rate in the San Fernando Valley Project Grad and a partnership
under ARCHES developed a pilot program to teach 200 at-risk middle school
students pre-algebra. The pre-algebra course would hopefully better prepare the
students to be successful in Algebra during the regular school year. The
pre-algebra course was taught using the context of Robotics.
Findings:
The students attended the summer session voluntarily. Keep in mind that these
are 12 and 13 year olds giving up the majority of their summer vacation.
Nevertheless, very few students dropped out of the program. The year before a
similar program was provided to the same students. Half of the students dropped
out of the program that year.
We believe that this initial finding proves the value of robotics as a “Hard
fun” activity that students will willingly work hard at and learn from at times
despite their prior records. We feel that identifying them early in their school
careers is important. We need to catch them before they give up on school, or
give up on math and science.
We intend to follow these students this year and over the years to see if
robotics is a factor in their future success in algebra and science and math in
general. So far our experience has been encouraging.