Tricks of the Trade: Insights on Evaluation

Many educators believe that activities centered on electronic tangibles (ET) and robots are fun and motivating for their students. However, it is often difficult, given the nature of both new hardware and new curricula to tease apart the nature and causes of this excitement. Formally planned educational evaluations can help build a deeper understanding of the effects of the new program on students. However, evaluating the impact of new ETs can be a challenge. Classes and workshops utilizing ETs as teaching devices are by their nature hands-on and may not lend themselves to traditional exam-based assessments. After all of the effort required to design a new ET, plan an educational experience utilizing the technology, and then implement that plan with students, evaluation is sometimes left as an afterthought. Strong evaluation methods can provide important insights into ways to improve a design and help to show the impact of a program, resulting in increased opportunities for funding, dissemination, and replication.