Abstract:

The integration of technology in teaching mathematics provides a wealth of opportunities for students to increase mathematical reasoning and develop conceptual understanding of mathematics. It is well documented that providing hands on relevant activities, especially through the use of technology, tempers student curiosity and motivation and engages students in the activity of mathematical inquiry and discovery learning. The use of technology also allows to establish more balanced connections among mathematics, science, and engineering in education fields.

This study reports on a pilot study of 20 elementary students’ (ages 9 to 11) development in working on a part of 2-week summer school program, which is an innovative integrated Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education program, designed with an emphasis on coding and robotics. Using coding and robotics is a powerful way to increase students’ interests and motivation in mathematics, science, and engineering. This study focuses on how the students developed their understanding of ratio concepts and proportional relationships while creating programs using block coding for robotics named Sphero.

In a sequence of activities to complete mathematical missions and math games, such as Reach the Flag, Golf Driving Range, and Mini Golf, the students explored and generalized the relationships among speed, distance and time based on their own experiments and justified their understanding of the mathematical concepts by using block coding and the robotics Sphero. For example, in the Reach the Flag activities, the students created the programs using block coding for Sphero to reach the flags at the locations with short distances (in increments of ten centimeters) from a starting line based on their estimations of the distances. By using a worksheet including a table, they were instructed to record the programming settings (speed and time) they used, the distances traveled by their robots, as well as any observations they made regarding the relationship between speed, time, and distance. Through engaging in the activities leading up to a mini golf game, the students began to make a connection between how time, speed, and distance all relate. Several students revealed their development of conceptual understanding of proportional relationships among speed, time, and distance. Prompted by the daily review worksheets, they developed their mathematical models for proportional relationships among speed, time, and distance, that is, the distance, speed and time formula.

The findings of this study demonstrated that to a certain extent, the technology integration using coding and robotics supported the elementary students’ development of conceptual understanding of ratio concepts and proportional relationships. This study also illustrated a method for STEM integration with a more balanced representation of the four disciplines: science (experiments), technology (robotics), math (proportional relationships among speed, time, and distance), and engineering (coding).

Keywords:

Coding, robotics, STEM integration, proportional reasoning.