ABSTRACT
Robotics competitions boosts the development of STEM education, but gender disparity in this field remains rarely addressed by researchers. This study focused on the World Robot Olympiad (WRO) and tried to explore the gender differences through investigation method. The research questions are as follows: RQ1, what is the tendency of girls' participation in WRO from 2015 to 2019 in terms of the four competition categories and three age groups? RQ2, what advantages and challenges do the all-girl teams have from the perspectives of parents, coaches and students? The results showed that among the 5956 participants in the 2015-2019 WRO finals, girls accounted for only 17.3%. The Open Category that emphasized creativity attracted relatively more girl participants. As age group moved up, the number of girl participants decreased. The qualitative results showed that the focuses of coaches, parents and students was not exactly the same. All-girl team have the advantages in their communication, presentation and collaboration skills but less good at robot building. The results indicated the importance of promoting girl's participation in robot competitions and STEM fields. Coaches, mentors and parents need to provide girls with more support and encouragement in learning STEM subjects, especially at the junior high school level. Organizers of related competitions should give girls more exposure and opportunities by adjusting the mechanism.
ABSTRACT
As a result of COVID-19, various forms of education and teaching are moving online. However, the notion of an online STEM camp is still in its beginnings, and there is little relevant research and experience in this context. At the beginning of April 2021, the research team launched an online STEM charity camp with the theme of "Shen Nong Tastes Herbs." Participants included 113 third- and fourth-grade primary school students ranging from 8 to 12 years of age from four schools in Karamay, Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region with weak educational capabilities. The camp lasted for 3 days and included 7 activities, while remote teaching was accomplished through Dingtalk. Pre- and post-test questionnaires and interviews were used to explore the impact of this camp on students. We found that online STEM camps could improve students' self-efficacy, computational thinking, and task value, and there is a significant improvement in the self-efficacy (p = 0.000) and task value (p = 0.001) dimensions. In addition, students with high self-efficacy had higher scores in the other two dimensions. Finally, we summarized the experiences and gains of students and teachers and proposed suggestions for developing online camps based on this experience. [Table: see text]. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10956-022-09967-y.
