Motivating Future Engineers: Building Situation Sensing Mars Rover with Elementary School Students

This innovative practice category full paper contains the outline of an upper elementary grade afterschool STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) extra-curricular activity (STEM Club) in which the students learn how to design and build a situation sensing robot like the Mars Rover. The participants (n = 40) in this study will be fourth-grade students from a low socio-economic elementary school. These students will participate in seven, one-hour long, weekly-STEM Club sessions led by STEM professionals from a Tier one research university. The experimental group will participate in hands-on STEM activities situated in a real-world context with microcontrollers, sensors, motors, and other electric and electronic robotic components. Additionally, this group will focus on the basics of coding, algorithmic thinking, situation sensing, and human-robot interaction. The experimental group will design, build, and test a situation-sensing robot while the control group will develop an online game. All students will complete pre-and post-test surveys to measure their change in perceptions and attitudes toward STEM academics and career paths change in their engineering identity.