This past summer the Project Grad Office in the San Fernando Valley offered a summer program to 200 at-risk students in the San Fernando Valley. The summer program was funded through a Department of Education Gear-Up grant. Gear-Up grants are intended to increase the number of minority students in colleges and universities. The purpose of the project is to follow a group of at-risk students (students at risk of dropping out of high school for socio-economic reasons) from 7th grade through 12th grade in hopes of getting them into colleges and universities. This summer was the second summer of the program. The students were rising 8th graders.

San Fernando Valley is part of the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) the second largest school district in the country. The project focused on 3 middle schools in the East Valley, Pacoima Middle School, McClay Middle School, and San Fernando Middle School. All these schools feed into San Fernando High School. The Eastern San Fernando Valley’s population is overwhelmingly Hispanic. The high school dropout rate in this area exceeds 50%. Roy Romer the former superintendent of the school district maintained that the primary cause of the high dropout rate is Algebra.

Algebra is a gatekeeper course. Students must pass Algebra to graduate from high school. All 8th grade students are expected to take Algebra. Most fail in 8th grade. They are allowed to repeat the course in high school but most students do not fair much better there. If they fail in high school they often drop out. One of the reasons that students do so poorly in algebra is that they do not understand its relevance. In a study in Silicon Valley only 15% of students surveyed felt that Algebra was relevant to their lives.  This is not surprising in light of the way that algebra is taught using x’s and y’s instead of real variables. Homework in algebra classes often consists of pages of abstract problems that use abstract algorithms to solve them. Only rarely are the problems related to real world problems. It is not surprising that students do not understand why Algebra is relevant to their future lives or careers.

Furthermore, educators understand that learning takes effort and is voluntary. Students do not learn because they are put in a certain room or a teacher uses a special teaching tool. Students have to engage in the class. The best activities are ones that are  “hard fun” as Negroponte coined it (Being Digital, 1996). Hard fun is an activity that requires a great deal of thinking effort. Nevertheless, the student is willing to put forth the effort because the activity is so much fun. Video games are often used as examples of this type of hard fun. Youngsters can spend hour upon hour playing video games. They lose the games every time they play, until they finally beat the machine. Beating the machine can take weeks and months of hard concentration. Yet they will put forth the effort because the process is so much fun. Finding activities that are engaging brings about a creative focus known as “Flow.” If a student experiences flow they are completely focused and extremely productive. Creative people are particularly adept at finding ways to produce this state in themselves (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow, 2002). Flow produces creative solutions and wonderful outcomes. Flow leads to innovation. Innovation has been identified recently as the “one last sustainable edge” the US has in the global economy.

Robotics is a school activity that has potential to create focused learning, hard fun, and flow. Currently there are over 100,000 students participating in robotics competitions around the country (Robot, 2007). Research on FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) Robotics Competitions from Brandeis University has shown that the teacher coaches believe that students really enjoy putting robots together, and learn a great deal of science, math, technology and engineering along the way. Seymour Pappert recognized this same interest in students using robots in the 1980s. His book Mindstorms (1993) is the result of his research. He further found that robots and computers often make abstract concepts concrete and more accessible to younger students.

Armed with this understanding of education and concerned about the high school dropout rate in the San Fernando Valley Project Grad and a partnership under ARCHES developed a pilot program to teach 200 at-risk middle school students pre-algebra. The pre-algebra course would hopefully better prepare the students to be successful in Algebra during the regular school year. The pre-algebra course was taught using the context of Robotics.

Findings:

The students attended the summer session voluntarily. Keep in mind that these are 12 and 13 year olds giving up the majority of their summer vacation. Nevertheless, very few students dropped out of the program. The year before a similar program was provided to the same students. Half of the students dropped out of the program that year.

We believe that this initial finding proves the value of robotics as a “Hard fun” activity that students will willingly work hard at and learn from at times despite their prior records. We feel that identifying them early in their school careers is important. We need to catch them before they give up on school, or give up on math and science.

We intend to follow these students this year and over the years to see if robotics is a factor in their future success in algebra and science and math in general.  So far our experience has been encouraging.