Evaluating the long-term impact of RoboCupJunior: A first investigation

This paper presents the concept and first empirical results of our endeavor to conduct a long-term qualitative and quantitative evaluation on the impact of the RoboCupJunior (RCJ) initiative. RCJ uses robots as technical tool to educate, motivate and inspire pupils and undergraduate students up to the age of 19. Our evaluation concept is based on three pillars (individual role models and careers, monitoring people on their way through RCJ, best practice examples by mentors). As a first step of our evaluation we have conducted nine semi-structured qualitative interviews with former RCJ participants. The main goal was to get the stories of their ‘RCJ careers’ and to find out if their participation in RCJ have had any effect on their future development. Especially we wanted to find out if and how RCJ has raised their interest in technology in general or a technical career in particular. Within the scope of this first attempt we take it as a fact that RCJ improves technical, management and social skills and instead we try to figure out why students seem to get ‘hooked’ on this activity. The motivational factors we have identified so far are the social experience, the engaged community and feelings of success, which should be considered as value concepts for teaching ‘interactive technology skills’ in general.