COSBY, Tennessee—Tina Williamson knows what it's like to grow up in the mountain country of East Tennessee. The scenery is breathtaking—the Great Smoky Mountains sit right outside her classroom—but poverty is profound, and few young people grow up with advantages like home computers. At Cosby High School, where she heads the math department, Williamson is no stranger to the challenges of Appalachia. Cosby High is also her alma mater.

To engage her predominately rural students to study trigonometry and pre-calculus, as well as the relationship between math and electricity, Williamson uses a subject that's as familiar as ants at a picnic. She has students in grades 10-12 create their own "bugs," harnessing the technology of robotics to mimic insect behaviors.

"They learn to build robots that imitate real bugs," Williamson explains. Their "cybugs" incorporate light and touch sensors, which allow them to mimic such insect behaviors as phototropism (turning toward light, like a moth toward a flame) or obstacle avoidance (navigating with the agility of picnic ants).

Students build their bugs from the ground up, which means "they learn the purpose and the logic for each part," Williamson says, as well as how to solder. And to make sure students understand the behavioral aspects of their bugs, a biology teacher presents a guest lecture on how insects use instincts.

For the final phase of the challenging project, students apply engineering principles to the design and construction of a maze. Then they adapt their cybugs to navigate the maze, and the race is on. "The cybugs can get stuck in the maze, resulting in them sometimes spinning in circles," the teacher says. And that means students have to find ways to get the bugs out—by getting the bugs out of the students' programming.