Promoting STEM Education through the Preparation of Multicultural National Robotics Teams in Qatar (Evaluation)

In recent years, university outreach programs have increased as an effective method of imparting a comprehensive perspective into science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) careers and disciplines to school students. Different models of STEM education exist and the implementation of educational robotics to pre-college students has been deemed impactful in influencing the students' interest in STEM fields. This is due to the accessibility of educational robotics as well providing an engaging, hands-on method of combining technology, engineering, and design. Therefore, with the increase in educational robotics programs, having an end goal for the students is necessary for learning motivation. That is why involvement in international robotics competitions would meet this component. Moreover, combining the multicultural aspect that has been increasingly predominant in STEM helps raise the educational structure to a melting pot pedagogy. This provides a solid foundation for the students' development as they experience diversity consciousness even in a technical setting. This paper highlights the importance and the techniques behind joining groups of multicultural backgrounds in Qatar to represent national teams in international competitions - notably the well-renowned FIRST Global Challenge, an Olympics-style robotics competition that brings teams from different countries to solve the challenges facing our world. Preparing for the FIRST Global Challenge includes gaining effective communication and problem-solving skills as the students work as a team to devise creative solutions to real-world engineering problems. The approach with which the students representing two different nations - Afghanistan and Qatar - were trained in a shared workspace will be presented. Qatar is known for its cultural diversity, and the schools across Qatar include students from over 100 nationalities. Therefore, determining a technique to be delivered to a multicultural environment is essential to the learning process involved. The details explained in this paper include the preparation, the topics and instructional materials taught, the structure of the training, and the end results.