Fostering development of students' collective and self-efficacy in robotics projects

Abstract

In robot projects student teams develop robots and participate in competitions through collective effort and highly interdependent learning activities. Since it is voluntary, participation in the project highly depends on students' confidence in their individual and team capacity to achieve desired goals and outcomes. In this paper we propose a project guidance approach that aims to achieve high level of both team performance and individual learning outcomes by fostering the development of collective and self-efficacy of team members. The main idea is organizing work in a way that combines collective effort towards performing the team project assignment and individual learning for mastery in desired specific robotics areas. Positive results of implementation of the proposed approach in the projects performed at Trinity College enable us to recommend further development of the proposed approach and its use by other institutions. © 2009 Springer-Verlag.