PROJECT SUMMARY

The City as Learning Lab: Spreading Technological Fluency Through Creative Robotics
Over the next three years Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania is home to an innovative experiment in which local
communities creatively engage with robotic technologies for learning and change. The experiment began
with Robot Diaries, a project in which female middle-school friend groups build robots for
communication and creative expression. It continues with Neighborhood Nets, a program where
neighbors participate in ongoing open studio sessions to discover their own innovative ways to use
robotic sensing and imaging technology to identify data that helps them make arguments for urban
planning and civic change in their local communities. Finally, it peaks when Robot 250 marks the 250th
anniversary of the city with a series of workshops and open studios that enable the citizens of Pittsburgh
to use robotic technologies to create public installations that creatively explore, document, interpret and
express their material and social environment. As these related programs take root with diverse audiences
and organizations in Pittsburgh, the city itself is becoming a learning lab in ways that transcend the
individual contributions of any university, informal learning organizations, or community group.

Intellectual Merits. The implementation of the educational programming is already funded by private
foundations and industry. 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 to develop and document
new measures of audience impact in technology experiences, identify features of university-community
collaboration that facilitate sustainable community programs, and “shrink-wrap” a set of tools and
resources that allow other cities to tailor creative robotics programs to their own unique audiences
opportunities. We call this research effort the City as Learning Lab (CaLL).
CaLL is rooted in a close partnership between the University of Pittsburgh Center for Learning in Out-of-
School Environments (UPCLOSE), the Community Robotics Education and Technology Empowerment
(CREATE) lab at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute, and the Georgia Institute of
Technology. Our work involves intensive collaboration with local museums, interest/activism groups,
community organizations, and after school clubs.
CaLL will produce innovative research findings addressing the notion of technological fluency as a
process and outcome of informal technology experiences. The experiences of up to 1000 program
participants will be documented through several research studies. Findings will establish evidence for
how technological fluency can be measured, supported, and developed through informal technology
learning experiences. We will also mount research that tracks technological fluency after participants
leave these informal educational experiences and try to use their new knowledge and skill at home or in
other learning contexts.

Broader Impacts. Impacts in informal technology education will be achieved by developing flexible
toolkits that allow other communities to adapt and adopt CaLL technologies, curricula, and activities.
Building from traditions in participatory design and action research, we are explicitly trying to reverse the
typical top-down outreach model so that universities come to act as accessible, reliable and reusable
partners for community engagement. What are the best methods to build sustainable partnerships? Under
what conditions do partnerships result in action and community change? What tools would help the larger
informal learning field understand and replicate our models for a citywide learning lab and strong
university-community partnerships? We will explore these questions with our community partners as we
develop resources that will allow other regions to develop their own partnerships around creative robotics.
We will produce new community design research that documents how our toolkits were or were not
successful in replicating fluency experiences with robotic technologies once the scaffolding of university
researchers has been removed.