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| What are your thoughts on STEM education in schools? Good, bad and ugly? |
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| EEVblog:
--- Quote from: Mr. Scram on February 16, 2020, 11:23:00 pm ---Most children or young adults that age don't have a clue what they want to do. When they do it's often for the wrong reasons or due to a lack of information. It's not a bad idea to expose people to a broader engineering landscape and whatever the outcome you'll be a more diverse engineer. --- End quote --- Sure, I'm not saying that's not a good idea. I'm saying that the best results will likely be obtained when you offer more focused options for those that do know what they want to do. You can have STEM subjects in schools up to the wazoo, but that's not necessarily going to translate into a huge number of more people going in to STEM. Again, I'm not saying STEM in school is a bad idea, it's good, last year I proposed a STEM maker space to Sagan's school, they bought me in the consult on it, and it's just opened. But it's not going to be magic and lead to an order of magnitude more kids going into STEM. --- Quote ---Look at you. All that looking at civil works for the public at large turned you into a YouTubing engineer producing videos for that very same public! --- End quote --- Err, EEV=Electronics Engineering Video blog. A 30 year career in the industry doing nothing but electronics. |
| nctnico:
--- Quote from: Mr. Scram on February 16, 2020, 11:23:00 pm --- --- Quote from: EEVblog on February 16, 2020, 10:59:36 pm ---Sure, and I don't disagree, mechanical is actually a big part of electronics. But can you say the same about civil engineering? Should I have spent my time going on site looking at construction sites and learning about theodolites? --- End quote --- Most children or young adults that age don't have a clue what they want to do. When they do it's often for the wrong reasons or due to a lack of information. --- End quote --- But who says they can't switch to a different education? It is not forbidden to change to something else. I took my kids to all kinds of schools so they can see what is what and told them if it turns out they don't like it they won't get any objections from me. School is like a job once it gets carreer specific. Don't like it; change it. |
| Mr. Scram:
--- Quote from: nctnico on February 17, 2020, 12:11:17 am ---But who says they can't switch to a different education? It is not forbidden to change to something else. I took my kids to all kinds of schools so they can see what is what and told them if it turns out they don't like it they won't get any objections from me. School is like a job once it gets carreer specific. Don't like it; change it. --- End quote --- I don't think anyone here is saying that they can't. It doesn't hurt to expose kids to a broader view and is very likely to help them. The very point of school is learning about things they don't know about and that includes other disciplines. It's good for Dave that he knew what he wanted to do early on and that worked out but I don't think that's that representative. Most kids and even adults don't have a clue what they want and more importantly don't know what they don't know. Even if you do know what you want there's a fair bit of evidence that a broad view and knowledge is beneficial in the long term. No discipline in science or engineering works in a vacuum except maybe in the literal sense. ;D |
| Mr. Scram:
--- Quote from: EEVblog on February 16, 2020, 11:33:04 pm ---Sure, I'm not saying that's not a good idea. I'm saying that the best results will likely be obtained when you offer more focused options for those that do know what they want to do. You can have STEM subjects in schools up to the wazoo, but that's not necessarily going to translate into a huge number of more people going in to STEM. Again, I'm not saying STEM in school is a bad idea, it's good, last year I proposed a STEM maker space to Sagan's school, they bought me in the consult on it, and it's just opened. But it's not going to be magic and lead to an order of magnitude more kids going into STEM. Err, EEV=Electronics Engineering Video blog. A 30 year career in the industry doing nothing but electronics. --- End quote --- It was a joke about how your experience with civil engineering has lead you to make works for the public, although I can't call content creation or running a platform or mechanical engineering "nothing but electronics". That's not a bad thing either. Your work is much more diverse than you give yourself credit for. |
| RoGeorge:
What worries me is the fact that most of those loving science minds are sunk into the software industry. "Programmer" is a very time consuming specialization, vast yet very narrow. I mean, once a mind is "tuned" for software, it will be very hard to make it view the world other than in terms of software. Then, the software industry is an endless sprout of software technologies that need to be tasted and studied and tackled to stay competitive, and that will consume all the time that otherwise could have went to some other science. Also, acquired knowledge in software technologies is very "perishable", in the sense that software technologies are obsoleted, or simply discarded, in just a couple of years, so it's an endless training then discarding. All these will force those already into software to never live the software bubble. Only a very few will manage to break the bubble and develop an interest for some other science. Even then, old software habits like unbaked designs based on brake things often and fix later, or test driven design, will stay in the way of going into something else other than software, where mistakes may have physical consequences, and there is no undo button. |
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