POMONA - A Cal Poly Pomona associate professor is helping teachers at three elementary school make math fun for their students.
The School Robotics Initiative, which started five years ago, works with teachers so students at Montvue, Pueblo and Collegewood elementary schools can build robots to grasp math concepts and enable them to master algebra.
"Algebra when it's used in the real world shows up in interesting ways and it's hard to reproduce that when you're teaching from a textbook," said Cesar Larriva, associate professor of education at Cal Poly.
"And that's why robotics is a great tool to get students to engage in significant mathematical problems."
For months, students in grades four through six at the Pomona and Walnut Valley unified districts schools built robots using the Lego Mindstorm kits. Students then, through the help of their teachers, used algebra concepts to program their robot to react as they choose.
The program is versatile enough to give students the options to use light, motion or sound to direct their robots, said Mary Lou Ortiz-Jamieson, a fifth and sixth grade Montvue teacher.
On Tuesday, about 140 students from the three schools put their technical creations and math knowledge to the test at a Robot Expo at Cal Poly.
Robots were challenged in a sumo competition, as well as tested on speed and turns and timing and dexterity.
"When the students heard they were building a robot, that made it exciting," said Misael Jim nez, fourth-grade Pueblo teacher. "So now to make this robot move they had to figure out how to program it, so that takes the dryness and boringness of math away."
Ortiz-Jamieson said with math if a teacher is not relating it to what students know, they're not going to get excited about it.
The long-term goal of the program is to build a pathway from elementary to middle school and beyond. As funding allows, Larriva and the teacher mentors he has guided will train new groups of teachers until the program encompasses fourth grade through high school, according to a Cal Poly news release.
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