Botball robotics and gender differences in middle school teams

Abstract

The Botball Educational Robotics Program is useful in sparking and maintaining an early interest in engineering and technology. Thousands of middle and high school students across the country have participated in Botball, many of them in all-girl or all-boy teams. Botball gives students experience in working as a team to strategize, design, build, and program a pair of autonomous mobile robots from a kit. They learn to trouble-shoot, to document their procedures, and to stay focused on a long-term goal. This paper describes Botball, an engineering outreach program for middle and high school students and their teachers (now available at the collegiate level as well). This paper will also discuss the National Conference on Educational Robotics, which includes the National Botball Tournament and also provides early opportunities for middle school through college students to present and publish research papers. The first year in which an all-girl Botball team participated in the program, they won the national championship in the robotics head to head division. Are there differences in how girls and boys approach being on a robotics team? Does it matter whether they're on an all-girl, all-boy, or mixed team? The authors ran focus groups with middle school Botball participants. Our purpose was to gain some insight into whether there might be gender-related differences in approach to participating in Botball at this age.