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Online COVERAGE (Competition Of VEX Educational Robotics to Advance Girls' Education)

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Conference

2021 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access

Location

Virtual Conference

Publication Date

July 26, 2021

Start Date

July 26, 2021

End Date

July 19, 2022

Conference Session

Computers in Education 4 - Online and Distributed Learning 1

Tagged Division

Computers in Education

Tagged Topic

Diversity

Page Count

8

DOI

10.18260/1-2--37537

Permanent URL

https://strategy.asee.org/37537

Download Count

313

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Paper Authors

biography

Afrin Naz West Virginia University Institute of Technology

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Dr. Afrin Naz is an associate professor at the Computer Science and Information Systems department at West Virginia University Institute of Technology. She is working with high school and middle schoolteachers to inspire the K-12 students to the STEM fields. In last six years Dr. Naz and her team launched more than 20 workshops for high school and middle school teachers. Currently her team is training the high school and middle schoolteachers to offer online materials to supplement their face-to-face classroom.

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biography

Mingyu Lu West Virginia University Institute of Technology

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Mingyu Lu received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, in 1995 and 1997 respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2002. From 1997 to 2002, he was a research assistant at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. From 2002 to 2005, he was a postdoctoral research associate at the Electromagnetics Laboratory in the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He was an Assistant Professor with the Department of Electrical Engineering, the University of Texas at Arlington from 2005 to 2012. He joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, West Virginia University Institute of Technology in 2012, and he is currently a Professor. His current research interests include wireless power transmission, radar systems, microwave remote sensing, antenna design, and computational electromagnetics. He was the recipient of the first prize award in the student paper competition of the IEEE International Antennas and Propagation Symposium, Boston, MA in 2001. He served as the chair of Antennas and Propagation Chapter of IEEE Fort Worth Section from 2006 to 2011.

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Ryan E. Utzman

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Abstract

In a state like ____________ where we have the nationwide ranking 50 in economy, 50 in infrastructure and 44 in education, COVID 19 pandemic is brutally challenging our k12 education. Before COVID we started a project called Competition Of VEX Educational Robotics to Advance Girls Education in which we analyzed the impact of utilization of robotics clubs, robotics competition and mentoring in changing the female k12 students interest in STEM. In our previous project we started to work with high school and middle schools from three different counties. Since COVID like all segments of life, our project was also facing challenges. In order to continue our project, we are collaborating with NASA ________ and offering completely online robotics clubs, robotics competition and mentoring for almost 100 k12 female students. Because we have schools from different counties and, consequently, on different stages of “re-entry”, we arranged the weekly activities into two tracks that cover the basics: Hardware and Software. The intention is for everyone to work through both tracks depending on their contact restrictions. Each week will start off with a 45 minute discussion where we will introduce the activities for the week and show connections between the activities and the greater world of robotics and STEM. There will be time at the end of each discussion for questions and troubleshooting. The Software Activity Track will last for 4 weeks. Students will work in the vr.vex.com simulator to develop familiarity with the VEXCode platform. Students will apply what they learned in the weekly discussions to complete increasingly complex challenges. VEXIQ and VRC will have the same challenges each week, but there are advanced optional challenges each week depending on progress. The Hardware Activity Track lasts for 4 weeks. Students will begin by following included instructions to build a basic robot. After the basic build, students will apply what they learned in the weekly discussions to complete a design-and-build challenge. VEXIQ and VRC will have similar, but slightly different tasks. The final activity track will last for 4 weeks. Students will use what they learned in the preceding tracks to customize their robots to compete in the culminating event, and will document their process in an Engineering Notebook. Programming will move from vr.vex.com to VEXCode IQ and VEXCode V5.

Naz, A., & Lu, M., & Utzman, R. E. (2021, July), Online COVERAGE (Competition Of VEX Educational Robotics to Advance Girls' Education) Paper presented at 2021 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access, Virtual Conference. 10.18260/1-2--37537

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