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GELFAND’S WORLD - How do we motivate young people to consider careers in science and technology (AKA STEM, for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) or even in STEAM, for that matter (where the additional A is for the arts)? I recently attended a national meeting aimed at science fair directors and STEM educators which addressed that question.
I would like to take a slight diversion and ask the following: Do we really need to treat this question as a national priority, or do we perhaps already produce enough people in the STEM professions? And if it has to be a high priority, how shall we focus our efforts? That question ultimately comes down to the specifics -- who among our student population are underserved? What specializations do we most need?
Just to focus a little bit, what are the relative needs for more electrical engineers, theoretical physicists, highway construction crewmen, and video animators? There are lots more such categories -- civil engineers, plumbers, applied mathematicians, computer designers, veterinarians -- and you doubtless can add your own categories.
One other question which we ought to be obsessing about: Of all the students in this country who would like to join these professions, how many will have the educational opportunity offered to them, and of these, how many will have the financial ability to fulfill their desires?
OK -- those were the easy questions, in the sense that our country is capable of building and staffing universities and technical colleges and even high school level technical training programs if we were to make the decision to do so.
One other comment. At the highest levels -- such as putting a rover on the surface of Mars and flying a helicopter above it, we excel. In the task of building space telescopes that have brought the far universe closer, we excel. There clearly are enough people at this extraordinary level of achievement, but should we be trying to create more, or trying to create achievers in slightly different tracks, or what?
I think these are legitimate questions, and I suspect that ultimately, we will recognize a need for more students engaging in more technical education. But the question I wish to take up is more fun. So let's do it.
Here is the harder question, and the one that came up repeatedly in the conference I attended:
How do we get students to become interested in science, math, and technology, and how do we reach out to the traditionally underserved sector which includes racial and ethnic minorities?
There were multiple approaches. Here is the beginning of one answer as explained by a Black professional who serves in a high position in a large agency: Mothers and uncles and grandparents should tell young Black students, "You are going to be an engineer." This, explained the speaker, is how he came to be one.
Admittedly, this approach won't work on every student, and heaven knows we can't all be engineers anymore than we could all be rock musicians or farmers or biologists. But for a certain cohort of talented kids, communicating the knowledge that "you can do it" is a useful thing.
So how do we let those talented students know that doing science or being an engineer is something that you might want to do -- and definitely should try? And by "try" I don't mean signing up for a 4-year university major, at least at the beginning. I simply mean that the student should get a little experience at the high school level in doing the sorts of skills and games that are involved in any of these things.
And by "games," I do mean games.
Here are a couple of the games that were suggested by STEM educators at the meeting.
One was a session on how to fly a drone. There was actually a room set up with drones and controllers and instructors. We got to get our hands on a controller and practice taking off, flying, and landing, along with an intermediate run-through in trying to design a series of turns, rises, and descents that would fly the drone through a building or land it on a roof. In essence, this was an exercise in programming flight. In thinking about a future in which architects, road builders, roofers, and countless others will have to use drones, it became obvious to us participants that there will be some future occupation known as drone driver, or else pretty much everybody will have to become adept at flying drones if we are to continue to participate in almost any occupation.
It's not so much that we need or want to train hundreds of thousands of drone drivers. It's just that we have to realize that there are going to be many skills derived from new technologies and future workers will have to be familiar with them. You might compare it to workers in 1890 who didn't drive cars or know how to use a digital telephone. Future workers will drive drones the way that workers of the 1920s rode streetcars and workers of the 2020s use cell phones. Or maybe it will be some other technology that we don't yet envision.
Speaking of the traditionally underserved in a technological civilization, I was made aware of a high school level group that calls itself Black Girls Code. You can read about it here. The idea is that one minority group can and should take advantage of the opportunity to become adept at computer programming as they enter an era where there will be substantial demand for such skills. They begin with something called block based coding and move up to professional computer languages.
There were numerous other organizations, both private and public, that were designed around bringing some hint of technical knowledge to school age students. There is something called NFTE which seems to be business oriented and is aimed at 6 - 12 year olds. There is something called Youth Engineering Solutions. Overall, there was the Broadcom Foundation, which underwrote much of the costs of the meeting and (disclosure) covered much of the costs for me attending.
At a wider level, regional in scope, STEM activists and instructors have created what they call STEM Ecosystems. The idea refers to a region (such as the Los Angeles area) in which teachers and private organizations work together to encourage students to become aware of science and engineering. The meeting itself had the ungainly title of STEM Learning Ecosystems Community of Practice (SLECoP) and seemed to be pronounced Slee-Cop by the speakers. In practice, it is what it sounds like -- a group of people trying to push technical education and career building.
One innovation out of SLECop is the idea of the Chief Science Officer, or CSO for short. It sounds like something out of Star Trek, but it refers to a high school student who tries to encourage other students to take a look at the technical career path. There were numerous CSO's at the meeting, and they turned out to be interesting to talk to.
And now for what might be the most fun breakout session I attended.
Invention as a high school program
It turns out that there are programs for high school students in at least some places based around the idea of invention. That is, the students are encouraged to consider a problem (presumably one that is currently unsolved) and then come up with an invention to attack that problem. You can look up an example at inventionconvention.org and for the California invention program, look here.
There are at least two aspects to this kind of activity, and maybe three. The first is, of course, to come up with that approach to an invention. Let me intrude for a moment and explain that we see quite a few inventions at the science fair level already. A lot of them involve some approach to aiding people with physical disabilities, and of these, quite a few involve some advanced methodology for guiding a wheelchair or helping a blind person to navigate along a corridor, or some other aid for a family member of the student inventor. Quite a few of the student inventors make use of modern, low cost, high capability computers and sensors such as those made available under the name Raspberry Pi, which you can find here.
But there are lots of needs, and lots of ways of approaching any particular need.
The student (or likely a group of students working together) may come up with an idea for an invention, but what comes next is what will help the students in their potential career paths. See, they can't just imagine some Pi in the Sky invention, they have to learn a little about technology in order to begin to develop that invention. Many of the students will learn about programming a microcomputer such as the Raspberry Pi model, and from that they will realize that they want to become adept at programming in a language such as Python. Others will want to learn about how to fabricate some wheeled device by joining metal tubes together, and out of that, they will realize that they have to learn at least something about stress and tension in mechanical devices and from that, something about the basics of Newtonian physics. And out of that, they will find that they want to know just a little about how forces are going to be handled in three dimensions, and out of all of this they will begin to understand the basics of mechanical engineering.
Or (stay with me here) the student may discover that he hates doing all of this and should choose some other path in life. And this is a useful thing to learn prior to writing that first tuition check.
The Breakout Session on Invention
There was a session intended to explain to us what the national invention program was about, and to embed us in a short exercise in how it is done.
Let me tell you a little about the invention project that my group was handed in the breakout session and how we handled it. I should explain that we were given a kit, which consisted of a few words typed onto paper strips, along with a marking pen and a writing tablet. We were told to pick 3 words out of the 6 we were given, so we picked -- quite at random -- the words Fresh, Restaurant, and Panda. Now mind you, my colleagues and I were nothing if not moral and ethical, and we could not abide the idea of opening a restaurant to serve fresh panda as in food. Likewise, we were not enamored of the idea of opening a restaurant to serve food to pandas who happen to be cheeky or insolent.
But we did understand that under certain conditions, it is possible to grow artificial foodstuffs in vats, using only artificial materials such as salt, water, some sugars, and possibly a peptide hormone or two, just as long as you have one cell of a particular type to start with.
In fact, you could do it yourself if you had the right substances. Just take a skin cell off your arm, drop it into some of that artificial culture mix, and add either a few microRNAs or just a few gene products such as nanog and sox2. This will convert that skin into what is known as an Induced Pluripotent Stem Cell (aka IPS), and you can then induce that IPS cell to grow into some sort of muscle.
So we presented our invention to the rest of the breakout groups as our partial solution to growing food for astronauts in deep space.
We remind you that we rejected human and panda sources out of delicacy and ethical obligations, but you might imagine starting with a cell taken from a turkey or a turtle or perhaps even a buffalo.
There was one requirement that the supervisors put on us. We were required to come up with the name for a business that might develop and market our product. We considered that we were attempting to recreate some sort of mock dish, much as mock turtle soup is marketed nowadays. But since the recipe was designed for those who would be traveling the space lanes at tens of thousands of miles per hour, one of our group developed the following name for this future source of proteinaceous nutrition:
Mach Panda
And this provides me with yet another opportunity. I don't get to steal from Dave Barry very often, but I've got to say that Mach Panda sounds like a good name for a rock band, and yet a rock band that Dave Barry has not as yet invented.
Addendum: Be Serious
Yes, there are lots of sub arguments and multiple opportunities to be developed from a discussion such as this. I will resist mightily the urge to point out that there is a bacteria B. cereus that sounds a lot like the above order, yet shows up in textbooks with monotonous regularity. So let's keep the bacteriologists out of this one and consider the arguments both central and ancillary.
What are the future jobs and therefore, which specialties, fields, and particular job skills would best suit the current high school student thinking about a college major?
Here is an example: There is a need for technicians skilled in determining whether this sample of DNA and another piece of DNA are from the same person. As the law develops (both criminal and civil), the use of DNA sequencing technology will likely increase enormously. This will not be due to the use in criminal proceedings, but because within a few decades, each and every one of us could potentially benefit by the early diagnosis and treatment of some genetic condition. The three technical obstacles are (1) The cost of doing your whole genome (going down rapidly) and (2) the ability to detect treatable problems based on your $175 genome scan and (3) the development of the treatments themselves, which might be conversion of your damaged genes or might be something else entirely.
So here is an entire field which will pay salaries to tens of thousands of people within a very few decades, and we don't as yet have the specific skills that we can teach.
So what is the prospective student to do? As my professors told me at a time when DNA sequencing, cloning, and even mRNA vaccines did not yet exist, the best course is to learn the basics and pick up the new skills as they come along. Those skills include, at a minimum, mathematics, physics, and chemistry. They can serve you in medicine, bioengineering, or should it ever exist, in fusion generated energy.
And for those kids we talked to at the STEM conference, it looks like some capability in understanding computer programming will be a part of each and every one of the above subjects, so you might as well get in on the ground floor, And all of the above will be involved, however indirectly, with the freshly developing discipline of machine learning, also known as Artificial Intelligence.
I should end by pointing out that learning the basics and studying technology is both interesting and often enough, plenty hard. It's worth doing for those who can.
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected].)
