STORMLab for STEM Education: An Affordable Modular Robotic Kit for Integrated Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math Education

The demand for graduates in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) has steadily increased in recent decades. In the United States alone, jobs for biomedical engineers are expected to increase by 62% by 2020, and jobs in software development and medical science are expected to increase by 32% and 36%, respectively. Combined with an insufficient number of students enrolled in STEM fields, this will result in about 2.4 million STEM job vacancies by 2018. Therefore, increasing the number of STEM graduates is currently a national priority for many governments worldwide. An effective way to engage young minds in STEM disciplines is to introduce robotic kits into primary and secondary education. The most widely used robotic kits, such as LEGO Mindstorm, VEX Robotics, and Fischertechnik, are composed of libraries of prefabricated parts that are not interoperable among kits from different vendors. As recently surveyed in Kee, alternatives to these popular kits are either highly modular but very expensive (e.g., Kondo, Bioloid, Cubelets, K-Junior V2, and Kephera) and unaffordable for the majority of schools, or single-configuration and lowcost robots (e.g., AERObot, iRobot, and Boe-Bot) with a restricted number of activities possible. An affordable solution that provides a number of interchangeable modules is littleBits. This platform offers a variety of sensing and actuation modules that use magnets to connect, but it lacks programmability, thus limiting students' ability to learn about coding.