EEVblog > EEVblog Specific

eevBLAB 90 - How to get Kids into STEM/STEAM ?

(1/3) > >>

EEVblog:

WizardTim:
I think my YouTube account has been blacklisted somehow as a lot of the comments I post those days are deleted or shadow deleted within a few minutes (and not just on EEVBlog, although correct me if you are deleting them). I suspect it's because I write my comments in MS Word and then copy paste them into YouTube, the magical all seeing YouTube AI probably thinks I'm a bot because of that, but serves me right for wanting English (AU) spell checking instead of YouTube's English (US).

I spent way too long writing this comment so I'm not about to waste it so here it is:

For me, an ADSL internet connection and 2 GB (later 20 GB and 200 GB) of bandwidth was enough to allow me to see the crazy STEAM things people put on the internet in 240p back then which is a massive reason why I took the path I did, today all this is vastly more accessible and there’s a lot more of it, so the job is already half done compared to STEAM several years ago.

However, as for putting things in the education curriculum that’s extremely difficult, our modern western education system is design to mass produce a population with an ‘acceptable level of standardised education’, as a result most activities in the classroom have to be assessable in some way to award a grade at the end of it in order to filter out students for tertiary education acceptance. If given the option kids are smart enough to realize they should avoid anything complex, difficult or new because they have a high chance of failure, however going into a new complexly unknown field especially when young and self-guided is almost guaranteed to result in a catastrophic failure and thus bad grade.

Another problem is if a kid choses to take a completely different direction to the rest of the class to say, obtain better data through a better more complex methodology, the teacher has to put in the effort to understand and check how it’s better, if you encourage that in a class of 30 students it is infeasible to check every students work so most will just be marked wrong for deviating from the assignment that has been the same for the past 5 years, even if their data is vastly better. I talk from experience in doing an assignment in high school with the question “determine which battery brand lasts the longest in a torch”, I changed the question to “design a circuit to automatically measure a battery’s capacity in Wh, and determine which battery has the highest Wh per dollar”, however I made that choice knowing I would be given a bad mark and I was, partly because the teacher didn’t understand what I was doing, but mostly because I didn’t know what I was doing, but the most important part was I meant a lot about complex topics (like MCU programming) that were never taught at that school, looking back now at my data I can see I was mostly correct and got feasible data, but I clearly didn’t understand everything I was trying to do and didn’t have the tools to do what I wanted to do which I think is fair to expect of someone in high school doing a self-guided project.

For me encouraging extra-curricular things is most important, not even the best teacher comes close to having the knowledge of every niche field out there that a student might be interested in, but the internet comes very close and possibly most importantly it doesn’t hold back with “but we won’t cover that”, it will go full tilt “as you can see here the metal has been activated by the neutron source in this gamma emission spectra I acquired on this LN2 cooled high purity germanium spectrometer” and that’s what encouraged me to look further into a field even though I wouldn’t understand it properly for 6 years (and still don’t).

igendel:
Background: I taught a short Introduction to Electronics to 1-2nd grade, Beginner Programming (Python) for 5-6th grade, and currently 3D Modeling and Printing for 5-6th grade. For better or worse I'm neither a qualified teacher not a qualified engineer, just a seasoned maker and a volunteer; and where I teach, the kids can choose whether to enroll to the class or not, so there's some "natural selection" to begin with.

My observations:

1. At least at such a young age, you can't really let them choose the projects they'd like to do, because (a) they lack the most basic practical knowledge, (b) they are not experienced in looking stuff up either, and (c) at this point they don't even really know their options, so they'll fall back on "robot" or "an app that [...]" or whatever the teacher hints. Even so, anything substantial they choose will be too much for them - unless you can team each and every kid with a mentor, to work on the specific skills required for his/her project. Instead, they can all learn a specific technique, and then practice it using "individual" projects which are variations on the theme.

2. Annoying and depressing as it may be, some kids simply have a natural talent for these things, and some don't*. This is not about previous exposure to STEM at home or otherwise, but about an appetite for riddles, logic, mechanics etc. In this sense (again, at the early ages I taught) I saw absolutely no difference between boys and girls.

* Of course, like any other trait, this talent for STEM is not really binary!

3. The natural talent is sometimes latent, and it appears and develops as the kid is exposed to new ideas, techniques, tools etc. So the very first thing to do, in order to get them into STEM, really is to expose them to it. They certainly aren't exposed to it in the media, or by playing with their smartphones. Most of them don't see it at home either. Again, this will definitely not make all of them into engineers, but it will help alleviate their fear of the unknown, and allow the talented ones to step forward and shine.

4. While it is impossible to advance without learning some theory, the worse thing to do is give them dry theory. I guess the same is true for most adults, too. The theory has to be incorporated into doing, into something they can see and/or touch. And this, unfortunately, is far more difficult than it sounds.

EEVblog:

--- Quote from: WizardTim on November 26, 2021, 06:08:13 am ---I think my YouTube account has been blacklisted somehow as a lot of the comments I post those days are deleted or shadow deleted within a few minutes (and not just on EEVBlog, although correct me if you are deleting them).

--- End quote ---

I do not delete comments. Only spam gets deleted.

rs20:

--- Quote from: WizardTim on November 26, 2021, 06:08:13 am ---... but serves me right for wanting English (AU) spell checking instead of YouTube's English (US).

--- End quote ---

I thought Spell Check was provided by the browser (Chrome/Firefox/IE etc), not by the website (YouTube). In any case, I can right-click on the comment box and choose whatever spell check language I want, right in the Youtube comments section. I'm using Chrome, but I'm pretty sure most browsers would support this.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page