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PROJECT DESCRIPTION

A. IMPACT

1. Audience & Impact

This proposal is to create the City as Learning Lab (CaLL), a research and development community that
will study a unique set of three related robotic technology learning programs. We target the professional,
with our primary impact being an evidence-based argument for how technological fluency can be an
outcome of informal technology experiences. We will develop research findings and a set of design
resources that will help informal learning organizations create and sustain programs that use robotic
technologies to facilitate fluency in public program audiences.
Technological fluency has become an issue of national importance, with many contending that enhancing
the technological fluency of all citizens is critical to our nation’s continued prosperity and economic
success (AAUW, 2000; NRC, 1999; Schunn et al., 2006). A number of different, but largely overlapping
definitions of technological fluency have been proposed. In Being Fluent with Information Technology,
the National Research Council proposed that technological fluency is the ability to “express [oneself]
creatively, to reformulate knowledge, and to synthesize new information” (p. 2). As the report further
states, fluent individuals “evaluate, distinguish, learn, and use new information technology as appropriate
to their own personal and professional activities” (p. 3). Similarly, Resnick and Rusk (1996) suggest that
fluency involves the ability to be expressive, to explore, to experiment, and to create with technology.
Such definitions imply that fluency goes beyond basic ability to use technology as a passive consumer.
Rather, fluent individuals are able to adapt or create new technology to serve their own goals. DeGennaro
(2006) takes the definition a step further, suggesting that fluency also implies transfer of technology
engagement across diverse contexts.
Studies on the development of technological fluency suggest that youth engage in a number of fluency-
building activities (e.g., creating web pages, programming, using desktop publishing programs and media
authoring tools), but that there might be gender differences in their patterns of engagement (Barron, 2004).
Researchers have also made suggestions regarding the types of experiences that can help promote
technological fluency. For example, some have argued design experiences and engaging youth in digital
communities can promote technological fluency (Cajas, 2001; DeGennaro, 2006; Resnick & Rusk, 1996).
Drawing upon the original National Research Council report, and bearing in mind the recent work of the
NSF-funded center for Learning in Formal and Informal Environments (LIFE) (e.g., Barron, 2004, 2006),
our working hypothesis is that technological fluency:
• Is creative, either in the problems posed, the solutions found, or both;
• Enables and is enabled by participation in a design process where ideas are implemented in ways
appropriate for the discipline;
• Reflects greater agency in and engagement with a community of practice that includes the
discipline.
Our work is based on the premise that the best informal technology experiences view fluency as both a
process and an outcome. In the supported conditions of a well-designed informal learning environment,
participants would experience technological fluency. This experience creates a desire to seek out other
fluent moments and helps develop the knowledge and skills that learners need to create fluency around
them at home, in school, at work, or in other informal learning environments.
We can clarify with an example. One of the programs we will study in CaLL is Robot Diaries, where
middle-school girls work together to build a network of robots that help friends stay in touch when they
are at home. The first series of workshops ran from November 2006 thru mid-January 2007, spanning the
school’s winter break. The girls were taking their robots home for the break and we decided to give them

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each two additional servo motors, in case they decided to modify their robots on their own. One girl,
Rosemary, used one of the servos to add a movable beak to her penguin-shaped robot. She then used the
digital video camera we had provided to each girl to record an explanation of her modification:
“During break, I decided to do something with the extra servo I got. So, I added a servo to the
nose. And it’s kind of being difficult now, because I need a replacement nose. But, here, let
me spin it (penguin’s nose moves back and forth on its own – she is controlling to from her
computer). It basically goes back and forth. And what I did is, I unscrewed the inside part of
the servo (she removes the cardboard nose, and points to the motor shaft on the servo), and I
broke a toothpick and stuck it in [the motor shaft], and I stuck my beak then into it
(demonstrates with the beak), and it was able to move for some time. But then as the hole got
bigger it wouldn’t move so much, so once I get the superglue, I’m going to superglue it
together, so I can just put it in and out, and that will allow me to have maybe multiple beaks…
which would be pretty neat.”
This example strikes us as a fluent use of robotic technologies, and a very desirable outcome for an
informal technology experience. The activity was creative in that Rosemary identified a problem on her
robot (lack of a movable beak), and used her knowledge of servos as well as other tools (toothpicks,
superglue) to imagine a feasible solution on her own. The activity requires Rosemary to design a path
from problem to solution -- unscrewing the servo cover, placing a toothpick in the hollow center of the
shaft, and attaching a beak to the toothpick, to produce a movable beak. She also had plans for revising
her prototype design to include multiple beaks.
By initiating the process herself and carrying it out independently, Rosemary demonstrates agency in
technology. She is choosing to spend vacation time to use and expand her newly emerging knowledge of
robotics. When the Robot Diaries group got together again in January, Rosemary brought her innovation
back to her friends, describing the modification and demonstrating the details and quirks of her design.
Rosemary began the program with no prior robotics or engineering-related experience. As the program
neared its end, she was acting as a confident, creative, and competent technologist whose robotic
innovations were admired and copied by her peers.
2. Impact Evaluation
Our project is not necessarily unique in focusing on fluency and its constituent facets of creativity, design,
and agency. Many technology education projects adopt related outcomes. However, the question of how to
define and measure changes in concepts such as creativity and agency is still far from resolved. And
relatively little research on the topic has focused on informal settings per se (Bransford et al., 2006).
Thus, a large part of our impact will center around research to develop and validate measurements for
tracking changes in technological fluency as participants master and extend robotic technologies.
If fluency is at least part knowledge and part creativity, fluency measurements will need to track both.
Knowledge of robotic technologies is relatively easy to track in informal settings, but what of creativity?
What constitutes a creative use of knowledge? The literature provides several possible definitions of
creativity. For example, creativity has been described as a characteristic of a product (Besemer, 1998;
Hennessey & Amabile, 1999), an individual’s personality (Helson, 1999), a situation (Roth, 1996), or the
result of a cognitive process (Klahr & Simon, 1999; Newell, Shaw, & Simon, 1962; Yokochi & Okada,
2005). In our work, we find the process and product approaches to reativity most useful, as these
approaches help us conceptualize, plan for, and explain the types of creativity changes we can reasonably
expect to result from any particular informal technology experience.
Within these approaches, there are different ways of describing a creative accomplishment. Some
creativity researchers define as creative products or ideas that are ‘world class’, i.e., novel and relevant to
a given field (Csikszentmihalyi, 1999). For our purposes, this definition is problematic as it tends to
exclude creations by those with limited knowledge and experience, particularly children. Another

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approach to defining creativity is to say that a product or idea is creative if it is novel for a given
individual (Weisberg, 1986). It is this definition that will guide our work in evaluating creativity.
There is widespread support in the literature for a relationship between knowledge and creativity
(Amabile, 1996; Runco & Chand, 1995). Some theorists believe that expert level knowledge is necessary
for creative achievement (e.g., Csikszentmihalyi, 1999), while others have suggested that creativity can
result from large shifts in conceptual knowledge (Chi & Hausmann, 2003). However, neither expert level
nor groundbreaking conceptual shifts in knowledge are likely to result from a single informal learning
experience. Rather, our task is to understand how learner knowledge, as well as the limits of that
knowledge, impacts engagement in a creative problem solving process (Ahmed, Wallace & Blessing,
2003; Crismond, 2001).
Our research on fluency will involve collecting a large database from over 1000 participants in CaLL
projects. We will then mine data to find moments where knowledge, creativity, and design came together
to produce fluent activity. We will describe how fluency manifests itself among different audiences,
contexts, and activities. We will describe precursors to fluency in knowledge and creativity processes. We
will track what happens to fluency once participants leave CaLL programs. These findings will contribute
to a broader research agenda about how to conceptualize informal activity throughout the life-span (e.g.,
Barron 2006; Bransford et al. 2006), but will also result in specific systems for measuring fluency,
knowledge, and creativity in informal technology. As part of our impact, we will develop and disseminate
field-ready assessments that can be re-used in a broad range of technology projects.
3. Strategic Impact
Research on fluency and creative robotics is of limited use unless our conclusions find their way into
practice and broader application in the field of informal learning. CaLL is built upon ongoing
collaborations that facilitate daily exchange between learning researchers, design researchers, roboticists,
and informal educators. Our work intentionally blurs the distinction between research and practice,
following from the design experiment philosophy that the strongest learning theories are developed in the
context of practice and the strongest test of a learning theory is whether it will break when it is applied in
the real, messy, and often unpredictable world (Brown, 1992).
Two lines of work in CaLL will lead to broader dissemination of our models, findings, and tools. First,
community design research will focus on identifying features of our educational experiences that were
most successful and sustainable. We will then develop general toolkits so that organizations in other cities
can use our materials to design their own learning labs. Important to achieving this strategic impact, is our
effort to restructure the typical relationship between professional researchers and community
organizations. Community programs developed by those outside of the community often suffer from a
“parachute problem.” Well-intentioned groups or individuals jump into community settings, implement
new educational and/or empowerment programs, do their research and attract media attention, and then
extract themselves. Too often, this results in fancy but unsustainable programs that soon wither because
the knowledge, skills, and resources needed to implement far exceed what the typical community can
draw upon on its own.
The solution to the parachute problem is to understand the dynamics of sustainability within specific
community settings and to incorporate these dynamics into each program from the ground-up. To
accomplish this, we propose that primary actors in the research, development, and implementation of
programs should be the communities, facilitated by, but not forever dependent upon, the "professional
researchers." We need a change of agency from university, corporate or government-driven programs, to
community driven programming that effectively coordinates university, business, and government
resources. As we describe in the Innovation section, we will conduct community design research with our
partner organizations to develop specific arguments, tools, technologies, and curricula that other like-
minded organizations would find helpful in adopting and adapting our approach. We will test the
robustness of general dissemination by new implementation of CaLL programs among our partners in

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Pittsburgh and among new community organizations in Atlanta.

The second strategy for CaLL’s general strategic impact will be to develop and advance the broader
argument for creative robotics as a topic that encourages participation from diverse public audiences. All
CaLL projects are focused on the creative use of robotic technology. We define “robotic” to include the
combination of sensing and actuation. This could involve fully embodied cognition in the traditional sense
of the term “robot”, such as robotic rovers, but could also involve less traditional devices such as robotic
flowers that open when the sun is shining outside or, as in the Rosemary example above, penguins that act
as emotional avatars for middle-school girls. By “creative”, we are referring to technology that can act as a
creative catalyst, which can be used to express music, art, emotions, values, and any number of other
important communications (Bers & Urrea, 2000). As CMU PI Illah Nourbakhsh proposed in his keynote
address at the 2006 IEEE conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication: “Rich embedded
devices, such as kinetic sculptures, dramatic performances by robotic casts, humanoid robots, and light
show and music-playing robots, all have the potential to excite and inspire students who see courses such
as computer science as irrelevant to their interests. Our hypothesis is that enabling state of the art
technology to be a superior creative outlet for those with diverse interests beyond technology is an
effective way to significantly increase and diversify the technology-literate community” (Nourbakhsh et
al., 2006, p. 392).
Thus, our approach is based upon the idea that robotics technology is utilized to its fullest potential when
it allows communities to pursue their non-technical agendas more effectively. This stands in marked
contrast to the most common forms of informal robotics engagement such as robotic soccer competitions
or LegoLogo design challenges. While very effective for audiences who are already excited about robots,
these experiences can be less than welcoming for audiences who are not motivated to explore new
technologies for the sake of working with the technology itself. CaLL projects first use participatory
design techniques to explore the outcomes and goals important to the community, and then facilitate the
use of new technology as part of the community’s toolkit for addressing those goals. This allows us to
reach out to audiences traditionally disenfranchised from the technology movement, thereby broadening
the reach of robotics technology beyond ‘early adopter’ communities who are already interested in STEM.
In doing so, we hope to pass on to each community a view of technology as a tool for any creative
endeavor, and introduce a new way of thinking about the use of technology in informal settings.
B. INNOVATION
The City as Learning Lab is built around three of our funded and ongoing informal education projects in
creative robotics: Robot Diaries; Neighborhood Nets; and Robot 250. These unique projects share the use
of specially designed low cost, easy to use robotics technologies developed by the Community Robotics,
Education and Technology Empowerment (CREATE) lab at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics
Institute, led by Dr. Illah Nourbakhsh. The approach to the creative robotics curriculum has emerged from
the programs that CREATE and the University of Pittsburgh Center for Learning in Out-of-School
Environments (UPCLOSE) and have developed and evaluated over the last six years (e.g., Nourbakhsh et
al., 2006; Nourbakhsh et al., 2005; Stubbs et al., 2006). Central to each project is the intent to build
communities of learners that develop shared practices around technological fluency, whether at the level
of a friend group, a local neighborhood, or an entire city.
As we describe below, current foundation and industry funding covers implementation of these programs
for the public audience, but provides only for bare-bones summative evaluation and no funding at all for
research and dissemination. Following a leverage strategy, we are seeking to multiply the impact of our
ongoing work by using NSF funding to build a systematic research component that can identify conditions
that facilitate technological fluency, identify features of university-community collaboration that facilitate
sustainable community programs, and “shrink-wrap” a set of tools that allow other cities to tailor our
programs to their own unique audiences, issues, and opportunities.

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City as Learning Lab Timeline

2007 2008 2009 2010 2011
1st Generation in Pittsburgh already funded
Learning (impact) research
Design (shrinkwrap) research
Toolkit development
2nd Generation in Pittsburgh
Implementation in Atlanta
Professional Dissemination

1. First Generation in Pittsburgh

Three ongoing informal robotic education projects are at the heart of the City as Learning Lab. Robot
Diaries is an afterschool/community program where groups of middle-school girls use robotic technology
to build and maintain friendship networks. Most creative technology experiences currently available to
middle school students (e.g., Botball, FIRST Lego League) assume that children come to the experience
wanting tinker with technology and compete (AAUW, 2000, Schoenberg, 2001). In contrast, Robot
Diaries is a rich technology experience that is designed from the ground up to engage girls in creating
robots that are responsive to their own interests and social activities, which may not be inherently
competitive or based in an explicit fascination with technology. Groups of middle school friends create
and use a Robot Diary as a unique means of exploring, expressing, and sharing emotion through a
combination of sensor inputs, servo outputs and instant messaging. Girls use a custom instant messaging
application in concert with a robot they design and build, which acts-out and responds to the emotive
content of their online chats. Furthemore, girls write programs to share and modify their robot expressions
with their friends through a web-based community, fostering a novel online subculture. The project uses
the low-cost Telepresence Robot Kit (TeRK) as a customizable robot base designed to serve as a means of
expression for middle school girls. Funded by the Heinz Endowments, Robot Diaries workshops launched
in Fall 2006 and continues through 2008. [ http://www.terk.ri.cmu.edu/curricula/index.php]
Neighborhood Nets is an interdisciplinary project that combines design, art, and engineering to discover
and articulate how communities can make use of network technologies to become activists for local
environmental concerns. Neighbors participate in community open studios where they adapt technologies
that combine a robotic environmental sensing platform, robotic panoramic imaging systems, and an online
sharing site (www.share.gigapan.org) to collect and express data about the local environmental conditions
in their neighborhood. An important aspect of this project is that the neighborhood groups will implement
these technologies together with the researchers. That is, this will not be a case of researchers/developers
disappearing into the lab and returning with a complete and closed product or service. The technological
expressions will be co-created through participatory design practices in open community studios that are
facilitated by community group partners who are organizations that have come together for local
collective representation and civic action—micro-economic development groups, environmental groups,
etc. Currently, in the working class neighborhood of Lawrenceville, the Steven Foster Community Center
is facilitating experiences where citizens are armed with noise and air pollution sensors that are creating a
shared pollution map of their urban environment. Working from this, participants will then develop a
targeted sensing network that will show, in real-time, ongoing pollution levels through public kinetic
sculptures or robotic demonstrations that express data and relationships through movement, light, or
sound. Other Neighborhood Nets projects will include workshops and events in collaboration with
organizations in the economically disadvantaged Braddock/Mon Valley region and with the 9 Mile Run

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Watershed Association. These two upcoming projects exemplify the flexibility of the Neighborhood Nets
curriculum and technology — able to be shaped for either 1-2 day workshops as in the case of 9 Mile Run,
or extended engagements unfolding over weeks or months as with the Braddock/Mon Valley community
groups. Funded by Intel Research, the community open studios run from through 2008.
Robot 250 combines elements of our after-school program and environmental activism projects with a
citywide event for the robotic expression of art, history, and culture. To mark Pittsburgh’s 250 th
anniversary in 2008, regional leadership is organizing a handful of “250” projects to build and celebrate
civic identity. Robot 250 is a project where youth and community groups invent and display 250 robots
around the city. The installations will be creative expressions centering on three themes—“The
Environment”, “Neighborhood and Play,” “History and Heritage”—that cross-cut all of Pittsburgh’s many
distinct neighborhoods and communities. Hundreds of children and adults will participate, with most the
robots being produced by workshops following the Robot Diaries model or through community open
studios following the Neighborhood Nets model. There will also be a juried show of robotic art produced
by professional artists as well as installations highlighting cutting edge robots from industry and
academics. The two-week display of the robots will take place June 2008 at museums and other locations
around town and will combine messages about art, history, culture, and robotics for thousands of visitors.
With primary funding from the Heinz Endowments and Grable Foundation (and participation from a
number of other industry and private foundations), Robot 250 workshops and open studios launched in
June 2007 and will continue through June 2008.
The opportunity of the City as Learning Lab is that these three projects offer a related but unique set of
examples that can be mined to identify generalizable lessons about how to create, sustain, and understand
informal technology learning experiences. What is common across all three projects is that they each
involve university researchers collaborating with community organizations, they share the same family of
inexpensive robotic platforms, they share the same arts-based approach to programmatic curriculum, and
they are each designed with educational objectives around achieving the fluid use of robotic technology
for audiences who do not typically engage with robotics. What is different between the projects is that
they each focus on different modes of informal learning activity (from after-school programs to
activism/citizen science projects to citywide workshops and events), each are designed for different
audiences (from middle-school girls to neighborhood communities to a regional audience of participants
and observers), and each incorporate different motivations for using expressive robotics (from novel
modes of communication to environmental activism to celebrating the art, culture, and history of a
specific city). The focus and breadth of the Learning Lab promises to yield lessons that will be broadly
applicable to a number of organizations interested in implementing informal technology learning
experiences.
2. Learning Research on Fluency and Audience Impact
The learning research in 2008 and 2009 will focus on audience impact. Led by UPCLOSE, with direct
involvement from the CREATE lab and Georgia Tech, the learning research pursues two main questions:
How do we recognize and understand fluent use of technology in informal settings? What happens to
fluency after participants leave an informal learning environment?
Recognizing and Understanding Fluency Study
A first step to broader use of fluency as an outcome for informal technology learning experiences is to
operationalize and validate an empirical definition that captures activity in informal learning
environments. Our working hypothesis is that technological fluency is characterized by creative problem
solving, participation in a design process, and engagement in a technological community of practice.
Across the three projects, at least 1000 people will participate in workshops and open studios programs.
To examine fluency, we will construct a database that includes pre and post tests on basic robot and
technology knowledge of each participant, collected artifacts and designs generated by each participant,

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surveys of each participant, workshop and studio facilitator notes, and on-line field note logs. In the hopes
of successful NSF funding starting January 1, 2008, we have begun collection of these general data now.
As of January 2008, we intend to also collect much more labor intensive, but ultimately much more
informative, data on 300 individual participants. In order to adequately understand the content of a
participant’s knowledge base, the research team will engage participants in a series of interviews and
activities designed to capture their prior experiences and knowledge about technology, particularly robotic
technologies. These interviews and activities would assess a variety of different types of knowledge,
including declarative knowledge (e.g., what is a sensor), procedural knowledge (e.g., connecting a sensor
to a servo circuit), and systems-level knowledge (e.g., what parts make up an interactive toy and how do
they work together to produce an observable behavior). This is similar to the information collected in a
structure-behavior-function analysis (Hmelo-Silver & Pfeffer, 2004). Participants would also be asked to
produce concept maps detailing their ideas about fundamental concepts such as “robot” and “technology.”
Our knowledge assessment measures will address two out of the three types of knowledge identified by
the National Research Council (1999) as being required for fluency – skills and conceptual knowledge.
The third type of knowledge identified as important by the NRC report, intellectual capabilities, will be
investigated via analysis of participants’ design process, products, and documents, as described below.
The knowledge assessment would be completed before and after participation in the programs, in order to
capture changes in knowledge. Evaluation of program products, with respect to their relationship to the
knowledge base, could also happen at multiple time points during the workshop.
In order to track creativity, we will use a combination of interaction analysis, artifact analysis, and
standardized measurements. Researchers have defined the creative process in a number of different ways
(see summary by Lubart, 2000). Runco and Chand (1995), for example, explained the creative process as
a series of moves between three stages: problem finding; iteration of new ideas; and evaluation of those
ideas (with knowledge impacting the first 2 stages). Treffinger (1995) defined the creative problem
solving process as one of understanding the problem, generating ideas, and planning for action. For the
purposes of this study, we define creative problem solving as involving three primary stages: problem
finding, solution generation, and solution evaluation. Prior research in design can guide our efforts in
identifying common patterns of high and low knowledge individuals moving through the creative process.
For example, engineering design research suggests that more novice designers often spend less time
evaluating their ideas prior to implementation (Ahmed, Wallace & Blessing, 2003). The primary data for
tracking creativity would come from analysis of video taken during workshop design sessions, records
produced by participants as they moved through the design process, the sketched and prototype artifacts
created, and observer field notes. One model for collecting these records is the Design Diaries approach
described by Puntambekar and Kolodner (2005). These diaries moved students through the design
process by asking a series of prompting questions, thus allowing the researchers to analyze students’
reasoning for their design decisions. Finally, we will also assess participants’ general level of creativity
using a number of standardized assessments. For example, the Torrance Test (Torrance, 1998) provides
several standardized measures of an individual’s creative thinking abilities. These measures will be
conducted at the beginning and end of the workshops, in order to identify any changes in general
creativity skills.
This data set will be a unique resource that will allow us to test a variety of questions about the relation of
knowledge and creativity to technological fluency. Due to the diversity of CaLL projects, a number of
quasi-experimental comparisons are built into the data set, including audience type (from middle school
girls, to working class families, to African-american youth), organization type (from community advocacy
groups, to interest groups, to community youth organizations, to arts-based museums), activity structure
(from drop-in programs, to after-school workshop, to continuing open studios), and in terms of individual
differences in participant interest, prior experience with technology, goals for participation, and
motivation. We will compare data profiles between such groups and track change in individuals over the
course of their participation. We will develop many of our final research questions in consulting with our

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Community Change Workgroup and Advisory Board, but some of the first to be tested will surely include
the following:
• How much knowledge do participants need before they can be creative with technology?
• Which events were most successful in facilitating fluency?
• What audiences benefited the most from the strategy of creative robotics?
• When did participants engage in the workshops and when did they disengage? Were there missed
opportunities to follow up on a teachable moment?
• How much scaffolding was needed for participants to engage in successful design processes?

Following Fluency Longitudinal Study

Experience and knowledge, as they accumulate across contexts, can sum to have a substantial impact on
an individual (Barron, 2006; Crowley & Jacobs, 2002). Interestingly, individuals are commonly able to
identify the event or series of events that began their quest towards a particular goal, such as achieving
deep engagement with technology (Barron, 2006). We will launch a second data collection that will focus
on the workshop as an event with the potential to initiate, or help continue, a quest for technological
fluency. The goal of this strand of research is to understand how the knowledge, confidence, and creativity
participants achieve within the workshop environment translate to other areas of life. In other words, does
the fluency gained in the workshop remain, even when the supportive workshop environment is removed?
The ‘following fluency’ study will track 10 participants from each of the three projects (for a total of 30
participants) over a period of six months. Beginning at the start of the workshop, participants will be
interviewed once a month about their levels of interest and engagement with technology. Participants will
also be asked to keep a diary and video log (using a video camera we provide) of any engagement with
technology, including technological investigations or participation in additional technology-themed
events. Participants in a pilot version of Robot Diaries were provided with video cameras and asked to
record their use of a robot at home. As suggested by the anecdote provided above, these data have proven
to be a rich source of knowledge about the participants’ experience. In the following fluency study, log
data will be analyzed to create a ‘fluency roadmap’ for each participant, tracking levels of deep
engagement with technology over the course of the study and allowing us to understand both the types of
resources participants engage in their quest for fluency (Barron, 2004) and how fluency may spur
participants to initiate technology-related action across contexts.
An important piece of this long-term study is continued assessment of both technological knowledge and
creativity. We hypothesize that participants are unlikely to experience additional moments of fluency in
the absence of knowledge and creativity and we expect that continued fluency will require pursing new
knowledge and practicing new creative approaches. It is possible that certain resources (e.g., classes,
clubs, or on-line communities) might be tapped when individuals begin to feel that either of these might
be lacking. At three-month intervals, researchers will visit participants at home to engage them in a series
of creative problem-solving tasks and to administer measures similar to the first study. Thus we can track
changes in fluency and discover whether and how those changes affect participation in technology.
This study be logistically difficult, but quite do-able. We are already familiar with the execution of this
type of data collection. In the pilot version of Robot Diaries, participants were visited at home twice
during the course of the workshop. During each visit, the child participant was asked to invent and
explain a new technology they might design to solve a specific problem, like how to water plants during a
vacation. Children and parents were then engaged in a circuit-building task, where they were asked to
find creative solutions to problems like making the circuit sound louder or softer. We will also be able to
draw upon the related data collection experience of the NSF-funded LIFE center through our advisory
board member Brigid Barron, who is a LIFE co-PI.

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3. Design Research and “Shrinkwrapping” CaLL Experiences

Concurrent with the learning research in 2008 and 2009, Dr. Carl DiSalvo from George Tech will lead a
strand of design research with participation from UPCLOSE and CREATE. Although moving to his new
professorship Atlanta in Fall 2007, DiSalvo has been for the last two years a member of CREATE and has
worked extensively with UPCLOSE in building the CaLL programs. He will continue to spend his
summers in Pittsburgh as well as make data collection trips several times each semester in order to keep
up his connections to the community partners. He will be assisted on-site and in his absence by UPCLOSE
and CREATE staff who also have gained the trust and confidence of our partners in their on-the-ground
work to implement CaLL projects.
Whereas the learning research analyzed CaLL activities at the microlevel of the workshop and open studio
activities, the design research examines the macro processes and mechanisms of engagement with the
various community groups. Informed by the learning sciences, the design research strand will pursue the
key question of How and what do we design to foster, support, and sustain technology fluency across
diverse networks of urban communities?
The CaLL projects present a novel opportunity for this research, as each of the projects utilizes a different
strategy for engaging participants. The Robot Diaries project works within existing informal education
structures such as after school clubs, while Neighborhood Networks works with loosely organized
communities and Robot 250 employs a combination of both approaches. Through a comparative analysis
of these projects we can ask: What sorts of resources does each approach require to achieve fluency in the
given community? How do the activities and materials need to be differently designed to accommodate
these different approaches to engagement? There are two primary strands to this investigation. The first
strand will produce descriptive models that can inform the next iteration in the design of the toolkits and
curriculum as well as be of value as ethnographic data for future researchers in this area. The second
strand of the design research activity will be the iterative re-design and production (or as we are calling it,
the "shrinkwrapping") of the constituent technology toolkits, curriculum and support materials.
Design Research Strand 1: Designing to foster and sustain networks of technology fluency
The primary goal of the design research is to understand how to design to support technology
empowerment and informal learning experiences that span and connect multiple institutions, interest
groups, and neighborhood associations. While the individual actor remains important in all of the CaLL
projects, the design research focus broadens to investigate the relationships among the network of people,
organizations, and artifacts that constitute each context. To investigate these questions, research will
primarily take an ethnographic form, such as is found in community planning (e.g., Corburnn 2005) and
participatory design (e.g., Crabtree 1998), particularly as it related to education and change (Barab, 2004).
DiSalvo is expert in this area and will lead in constructing a qualitative database from participant
observation, in-depth interviews, pre and post participation surveys, and other forms of feedback back
through the process.
Central to the design research effort will be CaLL’s Community Change Board. The board is made up of
eight of our CaLL partners and represents four different kinds of informal learning organizations (see
Collaboration section). CREATE’s Dennis Bateman, who was previously head of exhibits at the Carnegie
Science Center, will be responsible for the board into the intellectual life of the project. The board will be
active in the task of analyzing events, as the question of "what worked best" should be informed by their
reflections of how the projects serve their audiences and impact their organizations. To facilitate this
involvement, monthly project meetings will be held in which the whole Pittsburgh-based learning lab
(researchers and partners) meet to discuss emerging findings, explore the needs and challenges of each
organization type, have open critiques of specific activities, and strategize about ways to serve audiences
better and construct new partnerships around CaLL materials.
Complementing the ethnographic approach, we will employ theoretical models from science and

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technology studies and design studies that have proven useful for understanding and describing
technology use as a socio-technical process. In particular, the work of DePaula (2004) and Gärtner and
Wagner (1996) have drawn on scholarship in the sociology of scientific knowledge to illuminate how
networks of actors and material resources can be traced and assessed through the participatory design
process. In addition, the work of Fisher (2007) provides a robust model of "meta-design" for describing
end-user innovation and creativity in the design process. In this tradition, we will produce a set of rich
and grounded ethnographic descriptions of the processes and mechanisms of engagement with and among
the community groups participating in the CaLL projects. Central to these ethnographic descriptions will
be the articulation of how designed artifacts and events are used and appropriated by the diverse
participants in the CaLL projects and the role of the designer/researcher in that process.
Design Research Strand 2: Design for Shrinkwrapping.
The second component of the design research will be the shrinkwrapping of selected CaLL technologies,
curriculum and support materials. We use the term ‘shrinkwrap’ to emphasize the complete and contained
quality of the technology toolkits and curriculum that we aim to produce. This process will be informed by
our ethnographic analysis of CaLL projects and the reflections of the Community Change Board, which
will guide our efforts in identifying and solving any usability or usefulness issues with the program
materials. The core challenge of shrinkwrapping will be to balance the needs of specific audiences with
the desire to construct an extensible program that can be deployed by a broad range of organizations in a
range of contexts. Achieving this balance is central to achieving our goal of sustainability. Once the
technology toolkits and curriculum are developed to the point where they can be used by communities
without the intervention of the research team, we will fade the scaffolding we provided in the first
generation implementation and test the sustainability of the CaLL projects with second generation
programs run by our partners in Pittsburgh and then with new implementations in Atlanta.
The first step in this process will be to update the curricular materials. This will range from the adjustment
of program trajectories and session sequences to the re-working of existing activities, to the finer grain
level of "word smithing" the protocols, activities and instructions for each session. Particular attention and
effort will be placed on constructing the curricular materials in a modular format so that they can be easily
adapted to a variety of contexts and needs. The goal is to arrive at a set of modules that can be
interchanged by instructors allowing for a significant level of custom configuration of the program while
still achieving the desired learning and technology empowerment goals.
In addition to the redesigning the curriculum, CREATE will address any needed redesign and hardening
of technology toolkits. This includes both the hardware and software platforms that have been developed
to support Robot Diaries, Neighborhood Networks, and Robot 250. Rather than expanding functionality,
redesign will focus on improving any interaction or usability issues that arise over the course of the first
generation of CaLL and ensure the technology will travel with the necessary support materials.
A novel challenge of shrinkwrapping will be the development of toolkits that are applicable at the
organizational level. While many constructions kits and curricula for informal education exist, there are
few rigorously developed and assessed toolkits for facilitating interaction and exchange among multiple
institutions, interest groups, and neighborhood associations. One of our design research goals is
development of just such a toolkit. We will explore providing design guidelines, policy briefs, and
assessment forms that enable organizations to discover opportunities and build resources for facilitating
technology fluency experiences within their community in collaboration with other organizations.
Finally, both the toolkits and the curriculum will be "packaged" for distribution. Using the engineering
and design expertise of the research team, a final set of program materials will be developed so that they
can be deployed with the greatest possible ease and confidence by partnering organizations. This process
will include rigorous information and communication design, ranging from the design of a website for
sharing the program materials and building an online community, to the design of templates and
stylesheets, which will retain the necessary structure while allowing for end-user customization. A

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particularly innovative aspect of this process will be the design of service models that will enable future
partners to employ the toolkits and curriculum for achieving goals at the community/organizational level.
As with the analysis of events, the Community Change Board will be called upon and included in the
iterative design process. To facilitate their involvement, design workshops will be held during which they
have the opportunity to provide feedback on the initial program materials and actively participate in the
redesign. In addition, as we progress through the iterative design process we will present our sketches,
models, and near-final formats to the Community Change Board for their comment and direction.
4. Concept Validation - Next Generation Deployment
In current CaLL projects, university partners are heavily scaffolding the use of curricula and technology.
We are working with our community partners to implement, but we are always on site and always
standing by to fix, extend, or modify tools, approaches, or activities. But the broader shrinkwrapping
dissemination strategy requires that organizations can adopt and adapt our resources without active
involvement of the researchers. As we move into Year 3 of the grant, we will shift our focus to deploying
a second generation of programs in Pittsburgh and new deployment in Atlanta working with Spelman
College and Georgia Tech. To determine success, we will deploy a scaled back research and evaluation
effort based on our initial learning and design research.
Each of our Community Change Board organizations has committed to take up a second round of CaLL
projects in the second year of funding. For these projects, the partners will make use of prototypes of the
shrinkwrapped resources to implement programming on their own in consultation with us as opposed to in
partnership with us.
While the choice for Atlanta for a second test is largely because DiSalvo is to a new appointment at
Georgia Tech, the city also provides a stark contrast to Pittsburgh. Whereas Pittsburgh is a shrinking city
with an industrial past, Atlanta is a city characterized by sprawl with an growing economic base in media
and services. It should add to our claim of generalizability if the toolkit works well outside of a city like
Pittsburgh. To identify and support organizations in Atlanta, we will work closely in the second and third
year with our partner at Spelman College, Dr. Andrew Williams. Dr. Williams is actively involved in
robotics educational outreach with underserved audiences and is co-leading a new initiative to infused
robotic technology in community arts experiences. Whereas in Pittsburgh, we were directly involved in
the scaffolding of many of the technology toolkits and curriculum, we will use Atlanta as the test case for
determining the uptake success of CaLL programs in stand-alone settings with new community groups.
Georgia Tech and Williams will identify organizations, facilitate the introduction of the materials, and the
step back and document how the materials are successful or unsuccessful.
For the concept validation deployment in Atlanta, we will choose among the education experiences
offered across the CaLL projects and select those which (informed by our learning and design research)
appear to be most apt to dissemination. The criteria for this decision will include the ability to shrinkwrap
the technology toolkits and curriculum as well as findings concerning which activities garnered the
greatest response from audiences in producing moments of technological fluency. For example, although
we are only at the beginning program activities, certain activities and qualities of activities are beginning
to emerge as salient. One such activity is the Sensor Scavenger Hunt. In both the Neighborhood Nets and
Robot 250 programs, teams of participants venture into the city equipped with Canary sensors to explore
and document aspects of the environment which they commonly do not notice or measure. Such aspects of
the environment include general air quality, sound and light levels, temperature and humidity. Almost
without exception, participants respond positively to this activity, returning with stories of exploring
places they had not been before or of finding out that their favorite place was actually more polluted than
expected. Through this activity, participants learn from the city — the common and familiar places of the
city are transformed into sites for discovery, inquiry, and wonder. A common theme that emerges from
this activity is the allure of what’s gross. Across ages and neighborhoods, participants seem fascinated by
measuring dumpsters, public toilets, and sewers. With this little amount of anecdotal knowledge, we can

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begin to surmise that the Sensor Scavenger Hunt is a valuable activity to develop for broad dissemination
and we can begin to imagine ways to structure a scavenger hunt of the abject and formalize activities
around it.
5. Three Strategies for Dissemination of Research Findings
Our first strategy will help establish the research base for informal science education and build bridges
between informal science and formal academic disciplines. Thus, throughout the project we will produce
conference papers and peer-reviewed journal articles targeted, depending on the content, to the fields of
informal learning, visitor studies, community design, or robotics. In year four, Crowley, DiSalvo, and
Nourbakhsh will lead the creation of a book that tells the whole story of the project and consolidates the
research for an audience of researchers in education, robotics, and design.Our second strategy is to
facilitate research-to-practice by developing think pieces, white papers, and technical reports to introduce
findings to the broader field of informal science practice through outlets such as informalscience.org
(hosted by UPCLOSE), and the Informal Science Education Resource Center (of which UPCLOSE is a
Co-PI), and practice-focused locations such as ASTC Dimensions. Our third strategy is to target policy
makers by working with Carol Coletta (director of CEOs for Cities and the host of the nationally
syndicated radio show Smart City) to organize a year four conference that focuses on the idea of cities as
learning labs, highlighting the ways that informal science education partnerships can catalyze city-wide
learning and organizational development.
6. STEM content and Areas of Greatest Risk
We have noted throughout the proposal our STEM content is a focus on creative robotics as a promising
pathway to promoting technological fluency in diverse populations. We see this broader participation in
technology as consistent with recent calls for focusing on innovation skills in STEM education. However,
we recognize that our model of change also involves risk. By taking a creativity approach to robotics,
rather than a more traditional engineering or computer science approach, we are sensitive to the criticism
that we are modeling a ‘lite’ version of the discipline. Formal and informal robotics education has often
centered around building and programming robots to meet competitive challenges. Because these prior
projects have often been explicitly feeding a pipeline that pours into university computer science and
engineering departments, the focus of the projects was, appropriately, the discipline-specific technical
knowledge and skills used in those fields.
In contrast, we see our project as feeding a ‘mainline’ where citizens develop technological fluency that
can be applied in a wide variety of disciplines, including, but not limited to the parent disciplines of
robotics. Technological fluency is fast becoming a minimum requirement for participating in many forms
of communication, community, and democracy. In “From YouTube to YuNiversity,” Jenkins (2007)
highlights the bottom-up power of new technology to support networks that respond to people’s
motivations and needs. It is common to hear stories about how cell phones or videocameras have made
citizens more active and connected throughout the world. Robotic sensing and actuation technologies are
the next frontier for cheap, reliable, and pervasive technology. CaLL experiences are designed to put this
into the hands of participants now, and to help them use it for action in their lives and in their community.
Beyond the citizenship argument, a mainline for technological flueny in robotic technologies would also
have the advantage of creating a more receptive and familiar audience for later experiences that are
specifically designed with the pipeline in mind.
8. Prior NSF Support
CaLL PI Kevin Crowley has been PI or Co-PI on five related NSF grants. Two of them, Responding to the
Gender Gap in Informal Science Education [9552565] and Conceptual Conceptualizing and Assessing
Web-based Learning on the World-Wide-Web [0125652] were research projects resulting in widely
disseminated findings about family learning and the role of learning conversations in informal activities.
Two of the grants, informalscience.org: Building a Web Community for Informal Science [0610348] and

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the Informal Science Education Resource Center [0638981], have been directly at facilitating research and
practice crosstalk and providing tools for the field of informal science. One of the grants, Explanatoids:
Seeding Everyday Science Conversations [0217033], was to develop informal science experiences
through an integrated community, design, and learning research partnership. The CMU PI for CaLL, Illah
Nourbakhsh, has been PI or Co-PI on two relevant NSF projects. The first, Using Robotic Technologies in
Introductory Computer Science [0632887], is to infuse robotics into the design of introductory computer
science courses and to work with a other universities and community colleges to deploy technology tool
kits and flexible curricula. The second, Decision Theoretic Approaches to Human-Robot Social
Interaction [0329014], focused in part on technical design issues around emotional expression by robots.
C. COLLABORATION
CaLL is anchored in a longstanding and productive program and research partnership between UPCLOSE
and CREATE, which are co-located in Pittsburgh’s Oakland neighborhood. In addition to the CaLL
projects, prior projects of the partnership include creating and running the NASA Robotic Autonomy
summer camp in collaboration with the National Hispanic University and the Personal Exploration Rover
museum exhibit that traveled to the Exploratorium, Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, National Science
Center, and the 2005 Japan World Expo. The success of these technology-rich education projects and the
release of three newly developed low-cost educational technologies used in CaLL – the Telepresence
Robot Kit (TeRK) for internet-based robotic expression; the Canary environmental sensor/actuator; and
the Gigapan billion-pixel panoramic imager – have opened the doors for new kinds of educational
robotics experiences to build technological fluency in non-traditional audiences.
1. PROJECT TEAM
Dr. Kevin Crowley, PI, directs UPCLOSE and will supervise the whole project and direct the learning
research strand. He focuses on the ways that families use informal learning resources to develop shared
expertise in science, art, and other disciplines. He is active connecting research and practice knowledge in
informal learning through his writing, professional work, and role as PI on the NSF-funded
InformalScience.org website and the newly funded Informal Science Education Resource Center (ISERC).
Co-principal investigator Marti Louw brings 17 years of experience in science communication and the
design of informal learning experiences. She is a Senior Research Associate at UPCLOSE where she
leads the development of the informalscience.org. She was a writer and producer for WGBH/Nova,
Scientific American Frontiers and the Learning Channel and has produced numerous interactive
multimedia exhibits for museums and science-technology centers. Catherine Eberbach is currently an
UPCLOSE researcher and Ph.D. candidate in Education. Her research interests include facilitating
educational programming in informal settings and evaluating science learning outcomes. Eberbach has
directed exhibition design and installation, family programming, early childhood research, and project
evaluation. Debra Bernstein is a Graduate Student Researcher at UPCLOSE who has worked for four
years with the CREATE lab to conduct evaluation research on several technology education projects,
including a pilot program of Robot Diaries and the Personal Exploration Rover museum exhibit. She will
begin as the GSR in CaLL, but will be replaced by a new GSR when she graduates in Spring 2008.
CMU PI is Dr. Illah R. Nourbakhsh, an Associate Professor of Robotics in The Robotics Institute at
Carnegie Mellon University and the lead for the Robot Diaries and Robot 250 projects. He is co-founder
of the Toy Robots Initiative and director of the newly established Center for Innovative Robotics funded
by Microsoft Corporation. His current research projects include educational and social robotics, human-
robot collaboration, electric wheelchair sensing devices, believable robot personality, visual navigation
and robot locomotion. His CREATE lab seeks to bring cutting-edge robotic technologies to the general
public for the purposes of building community and technology empowerment. Other staff from CREATE
include Dennis Bateman, former exhibits director for 16 years at the Carnegie Science Center, who
provides expertise in informal learning project design, implementation, and production management, and
Emily Hamner who develops curriculum and technology for the projects.

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Dr. Carl F. DiSalvo is Georgia Institute of Technology PI, an Assistant Professor of Digital Media, and
lead investigator for the Intel-funded Neighborhood Nets project. He recently completed a post-doctoral
fellowship with joint appointments in the Center for the Arts in Society and the Studio for Creative
Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University where he worked closely with Nourbakhsh and Crowley on
robotics education projects, contributing a participatory design and arts-based perspective to technology
literacy and empowerment. Graduate students in Digital Media at Georgia Tech will contribute to the
design of technology applications and services through coursework projects.
Dr. Andrew Williams, Spelman College. Dr. Williams leads robotics education projects with African-
American youth, including mentoring the all-woman SpelBots RoboCup team. Dr. Nourbakhsh is
currently collaborating with Dr. Williams by providing technology toolkits to a consortium of educators
from historically black colleagues and universities (HCBUs). In addition, Nourbkhsh and DiSalvo are
currently listed on a pending grant championed by Dr. Williams that seeks to use arts-based approaches to
engage students at HCBUs with robotics technology. As part of the second-generation implementation of
the CaLL project, we will collaborate with Dr. Williams to disseminate toolkits and curriculum throughout
the Atlanta area through existing local community education and arts programs. We will also provide Dr.
Williams students at Spelman with technology toolkits and curriculum that they may use and deploy in
their own education and outreach programs, further testing the sustainability of the program and extending
the potential impact of the materials and knowledge produced by the CaLL project.
2. PARTNERS
Community partnerships are central to the City as Learning Lab vision. These organizations are more than
just program venues: they are true research partners that work with us to iteratively refine and package
curriculum and technology for broad dissemination. Through monthly community workgroup sessions we
will work directly with partner organizations to co-develop technology toolkits and associated curricula.
Musuem Partners include the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh (CMOP) and the Mattress Factory
(MF), where we are working closely with museum education staff to research, develop and implement
Robot 250 curriculum. UPCLOSE has worked with CMOP for over 8 years to bring informal learning
research into practice with new exhibit development for the $28M expansion of the museum and the
recently opened How People Make Things traveling exhibit (NSF/ESI# 0610348). CMOP is also a key
partner in the Robot 250 project, bringing arts-based technology learning experiences to museum
afterschool programs this fall. A neighboring effort takes place at the Mattress Factory, a leading museum
supporting contemporary installation art and emerging forms of artistic expression. The MF has integrated
the Robot 250 program into their existing community arts curriculum and are using their current visiting
artist as a facilitator of public robotic arts programs in an open studio model. MF will provide an ongoing
venue for community workshops and the future exhibition of projects created by local community.
Interest Group partners are Group Against Smog and Pollution (GASP) and Bike-PGH!--organizations
that provide resources for healthy urban living, and through collaboration, provide directed conduits to
community issues. GASP is a non-profit citizens' group in Southwestern Pennsylvania working for a
sustainable environment, free from airborne pollutants. Established in 1969, GASP conducts education
programs to inform the public about pollution and its remediation. Through the CaLL project, we will
collaborate with GASP to introduce robotic environmental sensors and curriculum into existing
educational programs and outreach with local secondary schools with a focus on monitoring air quality.
Bike-PGH! is a local advocacy group that promotes cycling as a safe commuting alternative in Pittsburgh.
One area of concern for Bike-PGH! is identifying the best bike routes throughout the city. As part of the
CaLL project we will use the Canary environmental sensors to map the pollution levels along bike routes
and make that information available to Bike-PGH! to disseminate through the local cycling community as
well as providing a forum for the documentation and discussion of air pollution issues as they pertain to
cyclists.
Neighborhood Groups. The Lawrenceville Corporation and The Heritage Health Foundation

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(representing the underserved areas of Braddock and the Mon Valley) are established and active
community groups that serve to situate and ground our collaborative projects in local realities. Over the
past 12 months Kate Trimble, Executive Director of the Lawrenceville Corporation and Ron Gaydos,
VP of Development at The Heritage Health Foundation, have provided ongoing support and feedback to
the Neighborhood Nets project. This has included assisting in participant recruitment, locating and
securing venues for community workshops, advertising events through newsletters, and providng direct
feedback on program development, ranging from design of activities to the copy text. A particular strength
of these two organizations is their interest in and support for using public arts and technology programs to
initiate change in the neighborhood.
Afterschool Programs. Our partnership with the Mission Discovery Program run by The Carnegie
Science Center in collaboration with The Hill House provides an opportunity to serve nontraditional
audiences for technology learning. The Hill House is a vibrant community center in the Hill District of
Pittsburgh--an underserved African-American neighborhood--that provides a rage of education, health,
and employment resources to residents. The Mission Discovery program is an after-school program for
middle-school students that developed to bring science, math, technology, art and history to residents.
Unique to this partnership is the opportunity to employ technology as a means for exploring not only
immediate issues but also the exploration of history and celebration of heritages that is central to both the
Mission Discovery Program and the Hill House.
3. ADVISORY PANEL
Advisors have agreed to come together in Pittsburgh for 2 days in Year 1 and 2 of the grant, as well as
participate annually in two conference calls and respond to summary documents we present for review and
comment. Dr. Brigid Barron, Stanford University, conducts research in the area of technological fluency
among youth and is Co-PI of the NSF-funded LIFE center, which develops new learning science theory
and research around issues of informal learning. Carol Coletta, CEOs for Cities, consults with city
governments to develop programs that foster urban community and hosts the nationally syndicated radio
show, Smart City. She brings expertise in urban innovation and communication with urban leaders. David
Driskell, UNESCO Growing Up In Cities Project, Cornell University, develops and leads action research
programs with urban youth. Steve Dietz, Artistic Director ZeroOne New Media Festival and Symposium,
organizes and curates public engagements with new media art and technology. He was previously a
curator at the Walker in Minneapolis/St. Paul. Dr. Maja Mataric, Univ Southern CA, Center for Robotics
& Embedded Systems, is a leader in the area of educational robotics. Diane Miller, St. Louis Science
Center, Education Programs, develops and leads community outreach programs focusing on urban
audiences. Dr. Dale McCreedy, The Franklin Institute, directs programs in family learning and is a leader
in the areas of gender equity and impact research on community programs. Recognizing the importance of
industry and private foundations as partners in facilitating technology education, our board also includes
representatives from those communities. Dr. Stewart Tansley, Microsoft Research Corporation, conducts
robotics research and champions robotics in education. Joseph Dominic, is head of the Heinz
Endowments’ education granting program and funds many educational partnerships around technology.
Andrew Chien, director of Intel Research, is interested in ubiquitous and robust technologies that change
the way we interact in communities and facilitate technological literacy. If our research and toolkits are to
have the widest possible impact, private foundations and industry will need to be involved in helping to
form new partnerships across the nation that can leverage our work in Pittsburgh.

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