Outreach Research Project Update

As mentioned previously in one of Cecilia's update posts, we (Ceci and Ian) are researching the topic of evaluating one-off outreach education events. There is a surprisingly large body of research related to this question. In addition to this research we are trying to evaluate our outreach events both here (Malta and Sicily) and back in the states, applying the techniques and ideas from our research.

Ian during an outreach event

As a major part of our attempt to evaluate our own outreach events, we are developing a website to provide followup lessons for the students we teach. This website will contain videos about computer science, links to other resources, and lessons in the form of a simulator which Ceci is designing and developing for a graphics class project.

Now we're moving forward with integrating this simulation into a website and adding the videos and links. In order to develop the website we've set up a temporary web server to try things out online and a locally installed web server for quicker development and so we can still work when we don't have internet access.

In addition to the website for student interaction we're conducting a survey of the teachers for their evaluation of how the students learned in the outreach events. This survey has been completed, set up, and tested so it will be sent out to the teachers within the next week. Our Malta outreach has been completed and we have one more Sicily outreach event tomorrow.

In general, our evaluation process will involve self evaluations which we will compare against the teacher responses to our surveys. We'll also be asking the other ICEX members involved in the outreach events for their reflections both the specific events in question and of ways to move forward with robotics outreach events in general.

With regard to our formal research of the general evaluation topic, as mentioned before there is a large body of research in this feel. We have collected a number of large papers on the subject and are currently working our way through all of them. We'll be writing a report on the different techniques for evaluation along with our specific evaluation of our outreach events, and plan to have a first draft done by the end of the trip.

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Ian and Ceci