Retaining Female Students in a Robotics Program
Gloria Ma, Lili Ma · 2018
As we all know, the United States is short of women engineers in the work place.Many female students lose interest in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) at an early age.How to encourage and retain female students' interest in STEM is a challenge faced by many educators.The paper describes our collaboration (Wentworth Institute of Technology (WIT)) with an allgirl high school to setup a robotics workshop.The high school administration is interested in bringing engineering and technology as a new component to their curriculum.From our side, we constantly seek outreach opportunities to prompt STEM and attract more girls into the STEM fields.After meeting and discussion with the high school administration, a robotics workshop was developed.The workshop was a year-long program that served as an extra curriculum activity for the girls.The program was launched in Fall 2014, starting with seven girls.By the end of the first year, there were only two students remained in the program.It was thus noticed that retention was a big problem.To increase retention rate, several changes were made in the second year when the workshop was offered, including for example, making the equipment available onsite at the high school, training a science teacher from the high school, providing more detailed step-by-step instructions, designing more individual (instead of integrated) tasks to help students understand the basic concepts, and to simply practice more.Results show that these modifications greatly improve students' learning experience since an average of six to seven girls participated throughout the entire workshop in the second year.This paper summarizes our work and experience in setting up a robotic program at an all-girl high school during the past two years.Details about curriculum development, adjustment, and modifications for improving retention rate are described.