Wednesday, December 14, 2011

Blog

STEM needs to branch out

By Rodney H. Brown

Today a pair of news items came out regarding promoting STEM education in Massachusetts. In the latest, the state awarded a three-year, $1.6 million award to UMass Lowell to prepare up to 250 new teachers in STEM teaching fields. Earlier in the day, Google Inc. touted that it had given $6 million in STEM-related grants to four institutions in the Bay State, with the bulk of that, $3.25 million, going to Citizen Schools.

The Google news struck me as serendipitous when their PR person told me about it earlier this week, because last week I was chosen to be a “Celebrity” Judge at the annual Citizen Schools “Building & Innovation WOW!” Apprenticeship event. To be clear, the name Celebrity Judge is theirs and the quotation marks are mine — if I were in fact a celebrity I would convene the secret celebrity cabal that they must have and vote wastes of air like Justin Bieber and all of the Kardashians out of our ranks. But I digress.

At Mass High Tech, we have for years been beating the drum for Science, Technology, Engineering and Math education in the Bay State, lauding the efforts of tech companies to help promote STEM education (like Raytheon Co.’s MathMovesU) and even the programs from trade groups (like DIGITS). But one thing struck me as I was going from presentation to presentation at the Citizen Schools event, listening to middle school children talk about the results of their 10-week apprenticeships — we have a type of tech blinders on when it comes to pushing STEM.

While the mentoring companies at this “Building & Innovation WOW!” event included EMC Corp. and Cisco Systems Inc., and one group of kids did show how to assemble a PC from component parts and another showed how to design a website, other mentoring came from architecture firms, urban planners and even Reebok. What was surprising was that those kids learned as much about math and how it gets applied to the technical end of the business world as does anyone listening to a presentation about MathMovesU.

Don’t get me wrong, Raytheon is doing a bang-up job (possibly a bad turn of phrase for a defense contractor) with MathMovesU, but programs like that really catch the attention of those students already interested in or at least good at math. Calculating the environmental impact of a building development uses math in a way that could get kids who had never seen any value in learning equations interested in them by finally applying them in an almost real-world manner.

Show a kid that math, technology and engineering have value, even if they want to be an architect, an environmental designer or a sneaker maker and you will get someone that takes a step onto a path that could lead them to a STEM degree. Sure, it may lead them to an art career designing sneaker graphics, but if we don’t at least attempt to align their interests with STEM, we certainly will never be counting them among the applicants to MIT or WPI.

The tent that we call STEM promotion needs to get bigger, and organizations like Citizen Schools need to be praised for thinking outside the techie box to get kids involved.