Coaching is a form of leadership that sets goals and encourages the growth of a team to succeed. A team should be built upon exciting learning experiences, the cultivation of productive habits, cooperation, and enthusiasm. Using robotics as a vehicle for the promotion of this learning environment can carry a tech-ed classroom to a level of greatness that Wooden describes in his book On Leadership. In this book he tells his story of coaching his UCLA basketball team to a level of greatness reached by no other team in the league. Wooden lays the groundwork for a roadmap that he spent an entire coaching career to develop. This guide he calls the Pyramid of Success is built upon a bedrock of industriousness, friendship, loyalty, cooperation, and enthusiasm. The next level of his pyramid contains four pillars of self-control, alertness, initiative, and intentness. This is followed by skill, condition, and team spirit, but to reach the top of the pyramid a team must also be fostered to develop confidence in their abilities and maintain an intensity of poise. Once all of Wooden's cornerstones were stacked in a sturdy pyramid fashion his team was able to reach the level of competitive greatness that inspired him to share his experiences through the writing of this book. An educator can draw many parallels between a classroom environment and the building of Wooden's competitive sports team. Developing a sense of Team in the classroom can create a more inclusive learning environment especially through the participation of the many robotics competitions now available to tech-ed teachers.

Student motivation in the Technology classroom requires the facilitation of an effective network of choice-based learning opportunities. An educator can shape STEM learning into an intrinsically rewarding experience through various activities involving robotics and competitive events. By providing students with the tools they need and coaching them through challenging learning activities an educator can alter the students’ perceptions of the seemingly extrinsic values of STEM based curriculum. Because robotics branches out to so many disciplines it can connect with curricula outside of the tech-ed classroom. The complexity of creating a functional robot requires a great deal of teamwork and provides opportunities for students to demonstrate leadership and compete in a content area outside of physical strength, agility, and coordination, providing a truly unique learning experience for students.

Parsing through the characteristics of motivated and amotivated students, educators can more effectively coach their students towards greater achievement. Public education teachers are the captors of their student audience, and students have little choice in how they spend their time at school. This inherent trait of our American education system factors into many cases of amotivation and low achievement in schools. It takes a carefully crafted classroom environment, in addition to engaging learning experiences in order to create motivation within the student to achieve their goals.

Enthusiasm in the tech-ed classroom can come from a teacher who is genuinely interested in the subject area and is excited to share their experiences with the class. Guest speakers are a great way to demonstrate enthusiasm for an educator's content area. Giving students the opportunity to meet an adult with a career in their field of study proves the relevance and reality of their learning experiences. Some students will greatly appreciate the various competitive program events of Lego, VEX, FIRST, etc. while others will be inspired by various open-source hacker-style robotics projects.

A technology educator can keep students enthusiastically engaged in robotics through the use of long-term projects. One important tactic in helping students successfully complete their project is by suggesting goals for various team members/students and helping classmates effectively coordinate their efforts with each other. Involving students in the scheduling of deadlines and various forms of assessment keeps their skin in the game and allows them to meet personal deadlines and reflect on their progress throughout the semester.

The enthusiasm of students to boldly adventure into the realm of creator confronts them with a test of patience, resourcefulness, and planning abilities as they work towards the completion of a project. Navigating through the design process as a team develops student's interpersonal relationships and helps them validate the interconnectedness of science technology engineering and math as they draw upon prior knowledge and experiences of their other core content classes, hobbies, guest speakers, and internet resources. All of these skills are essential in any career, leadership position, or personal endeavor.

Skill development can be coached by a robotics instructor because the study of robotics requires students to develop countless skills in problem solving, design, understanding of simple machines, electronics, programming, teamwork, math, engineering, systems integration and countless other relative fields of study. The cultural, social, economic, and political effects of technology can also be studied through lessons and class discussions on robotics. See Fig. 1 for a map of different subjects that robotics incorporates.

 

 

The ultimate goal in a technology classroom is to promote technological literacy. The ITEEA's standards for technological literacy can be explored through the incorporation of robotics in the tech-ed curriculum. The future our society is running towards is inevitably accelerating into a faster-paced world of technological progress and achievements built upon the previous generation's technological advancements. Artificial intelligence, automation, the internet, and our ability to expand the computing power of semiconductors into ever smaller circuits will surely create a technological ecology where robotics will flourish. This relatively new field of study is a great launching point from which to study the ideas expounded in the STL. No one knows exactly what the future will bring but the present trends indicate that robotics will play an extending role in the future of developed societies. Wooden's perspective on the human struggle towards competitive greatness has a far-reaching relevance when compared to this aspect of our technological future. By enthusiastically engaging students of technology with robotics they will develop the skills to be better prepared and motivated to actively shape their future society in much the same way Wooden was able to coach his UCLA basketball team to the top of their game.