Informatics in Education

This paper describes a study of students' meaningful learning of the engineering design process during their participation in robotics activities. The population consisted of middle-school students (ages 13-15 years) who participated in the FIRST® LEGO® League competition. The methodology used was qualitative, including observations and interviews. The analysis was based on the Revised Bloom Taxonomy. Almost all the groups demonstrated meaningful learning, although some reached higher levels than others. Most of the groups demonstrated the understanding/applying level during each of the design process phases (searching and decision making, construction and testing, diagnosing and debugging), some demonstrated the analyzing/evaluating level, but only a few demonstrated the higher level of creating. Factors that seemed to play a role in the students' learning include: (a) the teaching or mentoring style; (b) the absence of a robotics textbook; (c) the extra-curricular competition-oriented nature of the activities; and (d) the unstable nature of the design of the robot.