ABSTRACT
Helping students feel at ease with ambiguity does not mean that students remain blithely ignorant of the details or indifferent to the learning process. It means teachers provide students with the desire and the tools to deal effectively with ambiguous situations and provide a means to help them clarify the next steps. Teachers need to inject a little uncertainty into their lessons every day because it engages students at the “analysis and above” levels commonly known as higher-order thinking skills. In reality, the uncertainty principle is an inextricable part of math, statistics, and especially science, and as a matter of fact, it is accepted that any research involves a certain amount of uncertainty. Robotics competitions are full of frustration and ambiguity. Teams from all over the United States compete in the US FIRST® Robotics competition. Each year, student teams are given a different task for their robots to complete.
