Holly Golecki
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, IL·Education Research·Early-career
Robots are usually introduced to teenagers as rigid machines and competitions, which appeals to some students and turns others away. Soft robots are different: they are electro-mechanical devices built from squishy, low-stiffness materials, so they can touch and move alongside people safely, in wearable devices and assistive tools.
- Fields
Education Research
Engineering
- Topics
engineering education
soft robotics
human-centered design
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jul 2030
What they work on
- Develop and validate a new measure of human-centered design self-efficacy for high school students, so that curricula can be evaluated on whether students believe they can design for real end users.
- Design a multi-year human-centered soft robotics curricular strand, using low-stiffness materials and wearable device projects, embedded within existing high school science courses.
- Conduct a mixed methods, longitudinal study of how the curriculum affects students' career attitudes, engineering identity, and engineering agency beliefs across partnering rural, suburban, and urban high schools.
- Produce a transferable framework and career resources that equip teachers, schools, and families to teach engineering concepts within science and support robotics career interest as early as high school.
More about the research
This project asks whether teaching robotics through human-centered design, where students start from a real person's needs, can change how high school students see engineering and whether they picture themselves in it.
Why it matters
The engineering workforce needs roboticists, but current K-12 robotics pathways reach a narrow slice of students. A validated measure of human-centered design self-efficacy and a science-integrated soft robotics curriculum could give teachers in rural, suburban, and urban high schools practical tools to broaden who develops robotics career interest, and the findings are intended to transfer to other robotics and STEM fields.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Emma Treadway
Trinity University, TX·Education Research
Compare first- and second-year engineering students' local affect, the emotions they experience in the moment, while doing engineering work versus mathematics and science work, using interviews and surveys across four semesters.
Lance Perez
University of Nebraska-Lincoln, NE·Education Research
Identify the rural assets and structural barriers that shape engineering awareness before college, through site visits and semi-structured interviews with principals, counselors and STEM teachers at rural Nebraska high schools.
Hamid Nadir
University of North Carolina at Greensboro, NC·Education Research
Identify challenges and opportunities in current elementary curricula and co-design a combined Biology and Computer Science (Bio+CS) curriculum with local teachers and students.
The school
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign: 41 labs on PI Pages, $907M a year on research, 870 research doctorates a year.
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