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Change Doesn't Just Happen I gave a presentation a few months ago and a man said, "People all over the world have always been trying to promote engineering. What you do isn't any different than what they've been doing for the last 30 years. It's not going to work." He claimed that all the competitions, all the events and camps are all the same and it's never going to make a difference in how the general public views engineering. Posted by Celeste Baine on November 5, 2009 Talkback From Dave Massey - What your detractor doesn't realize is that maybe the nature of competitions, tournaments, and contests doesn't change but it's the participants, students, that are the change. Every year we get new kids participating who are joining events at entry level and becoming motivated to learn about these 'new' things. In the meanwhile, the continuing students are enjoying exploring programing and engineering challenges with the deeper understanding they have developed from past events. We not dealing with a static group.
A great question to the detractor may be what if we yawned because the events are the same and stopped financing and promoting events; where would tomorrow's science leaders find inspiration and knowledge?
The San Diego Science Alliance's Robotic Education Program is striving to coordinate and publicize all robotic education efforts in San Diego from elementary through university. We have a dedicated group of volunteers representing First, Vex, Botball, community colleges, universities, and private non-profits meeting regularly to coordinate and promote robotics education.
Our Robotic Education Expo, which took place on Oct. 10, experienced close to 300 teachers, parents, and students of all ages coming through to talk to industry and education represenitives, all volunteering for the event, about current and future opportunities in robotics. This was evidence for me that interest and desire for the educational events is strong and growing.
Posted on November 5, 2009 at 8:46 am PST From Martin Rayala - One of the characteristics of a person in design and engineering is that they believe they can make a difference. Designers and engineers are the people who create the world in which others live.
Designing and engineering start with a general feeling of optimism. People who create the future know that what they do does make a difference and believe that the world can be made better for everyone on the planet through better design and engineering.
http://andDESIGNmagazine.blogspot.com
Posted on November 5, 2009 at 8:41 am PST From Leann Yoder - Yes! We have been promoting engineering for more than 30 years, but if we don't I'm fairly certain we'd see even fewer students going into engineering and STEM fields and even fewer girls and other underrepresented groups.
While those of us promoting engineering would love to see huge jumps in the number of students pursuing engineering degrees, but I believe that even the individual success stories matter. Just this week, we received this message from a JETS stakeholder:
Chatham Hall (an all girls school in VA) began their participation in TEAMS in 2008. The teacher of the team at Chatham Hall (Molly Thomas) shared with us that one of her past TEAMS students, Sierra (TEAMS member for two years) is now a college freshman at VA Tech pursing a degree in engineering and she credits TEAMS for introducing her to engineering. What is so wonderful is that she has gone back to Chatham Hall to talk with the girls about engineering and is encouraging them to follow in her footsteps!
In addition, in doing pre and post assessments of JETS participants, we discovered:
After Participating in JETS, students say: Teachers say: Isn't it nice to know we are making a difference? Posted on November 5, 2009 at 7:18 am PST Comments are disabled for posts older than 6 months. |
