CAREER: Supporting Professional Formation of Robotics Engineers through a Human-Centered Design Approach

About This Grant

The future of the engineering and technology workforce will rely on robotics engineers to aid in unleashing ground breaking discoveries and translational solutions to the nation’s greatest challenges. Robots developed through a human-centered design approach have a focus on the end user and designs to best meet their needs. Soft robots describe those electro-mechanical devices made from low-modulus materials that can safely interact with people for a variety of applications. Soft robotics innovation sits at the nexus of advances in materials, automation, and biotechnology. Current strategies to attract K12 students to robotics-aligned engineering majors and careers are not equipped to meet the needs of the future workforce. This project will aim to deliver new curriculum for students to develop their science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) talent by embedding a curricular strand of human-centered soft robotics throughout science courses in high school. This project will study the implementation of a design-based curriculum and the opportunities it creates for students to design solutions to challenges relevant to the United States and its people to increase engagement in engineering. By centering end users, we can reveal for students that robotics requires a multidisciplinary approach and can align with personal goals to advance the national health, prosperity and welfare. Given the intentional partnership with high schools in rural, suburban and urban schools, our findings can be translated across educational context to support professional formation of robotics engineers. This will ultimately lead to a stronger technical workforce and global science and engineering competitiveness. This project will build on pilot work to conduct the first mixed methods, longitudinal study of the impact of human-centered soft robotics on student career attitudes. This project will reveal aspects of a multi-year robotics curriculum that appeals to students’ engineering agency beliefs through validating a new measure, human-centered design self-efficacy for high school students. This project will ask, how can pre-college curricula be reimagined to change students’ perceptions of engineering majors through emotional connection to curricular applications? To answer this question, this CAREER project will conduct an integrated research and education project to disrupt traditional robotics education with a science-integrated, human-centered soft robotics curriculum and career resources. Robots developed for wearable technologies, for example, may align with engineering agency beliefs and aid in development of self-efficacy, identities and career interest. We argue that supporting engineering identity and career interest in robotics will require a multifaceted approach that equips teachers, schools, families, and students with resources, hence our planned educational activities. Understanding more deeply how human-centered design can create an enriching educational environment will fundamentally change approaches to engineering education to recruit roboticists and engineers to meet society’s most significant technical challenges. New knowledge generated in methods to measure human-centered design engineering self-efficacy can be used to improve existing robotics and engineering curricula. While studied in the context of soft robotics, findings from this project will be broadly applicable to other robotics and STEM fields. This integrated research and education project will produce a framework by which educators can teach engineering concepts in science to (1) change perceptions of robotics, and (2) empower students to develop robotics engineering career interest as early as high school. Directly through this project, thousands of students will benefit from a new multi-year science curriculum. Findings from this study will pave the way for increasing the number of students in the engineering workforce, so that new innovative technologies that benefit all of society can be realized. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.