Diversifying Participation In First Lego League

摘要

Abstract NOTE: The first page of text has been automatically extracted and included below in lieu of an abstract Diversifying Participation in FIRST Lego League Introduction The FIRST LEGO League (FLL) competition is frequently promoted as an effective method of introducing middle school children to engineering problem solving and of increasing the pipeline of students into engineering and other STEM disciplines1,2,3,4,5,6. The FLL program challenges students ages 9-14 to tackle a problem with a socially relevant theme and is designed to increase the students’ awareness of current affairs and possible engineering solutions. Each student team is required to build a robot that can perform 8-10 tasks that relate to the overarching theme, and to research the theme and develop a product or strategy to address the social issue. The tournament consists of the robot competition, presentation of the research projects, and an analysis of the technical and creative merits of the robot design. Historically, FLL has addressed issues such as alternative power sources and use of resources (2007), an exploration into the possibilities of nanotechnology (2006), the ocean resources and how we interact with them (2005) and making the world more accessible to the disabled (2004). The 2007 international FLL competition, coordinated by FIRST LEGO League International, is projected to include 10,600 teams and 106,000 children from 31 countries7. This is an increase of 18% over the previous year’s participation rate. The FLL growth in Georgia has been even more dramatic, with the Figure 1--Number of Georgia Teams Registered with FLL number of Georgia teams registering with FLL 300 increasing from 48 in 2004 250 to 244 in 2007, for an average increase of 75% per 200 # Teams year for each of the last 5 150 years (Figure 1). Clearly FLL is a highly successful 100 program that provides a 50 compelling experience to middle school students, and 0 appeals to the parent, 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 Year teacher, university and corporate volunteers necessary to coordinate the program. As more and more resources in the form of both time and money are dedicated to any student enrichment program, it is important to monitor exactly who is participating and under what circumstances. This information can help us to proactively create an infrastructure that promotes successful participation by students historically under-represented in the field. It is currently impossible to find data about the demographics of students participating in the national FLL program, as the national organization does not collect these types of statistics from the individual teams or state organizers. During the last two years the Georgia state-wide FLL program, which