Also this Thursday is the RSPS Science Fair, sponsored by Northrop Grumman and Caputo's Corner (OK...not really). We will have a wide variety of projects from 8th grade all the way down to 1st, even though we only opened it down the 3rd. Hey, if the kid's got imagination, why stifle it?
As you can imagine, this week will be awfully busy for your humble correspondent, so I will not be able to post as often as I would like. However, when I do get a chance to post, the posts will all be about STEM related topics, starting right now with what STEM means for education.
Why should we care about STEM? Kids usually rephrase this question into "why should I care?" This is the biggest focus nowadays in the nationwide STEM initiative. The bottom line is very simple. This country is the most technologically advanced country in the world. Yet, statistics say that very few of our school-age students have a desire to pursue careers in the sciences. Many of these careers are outsourced to Asia. Why is this? Pretty simply, kids today view science as "uncool" or nerdy. As we all remember from our days in kid-dom, the ultimate goal was not to get good grades or make advances toward potential careers. The ultimate goal was to be "cool." If science is uncool, then we avoided it like the plague. This is the cultural stigma that major science and tech leaders (like NG, NASA, and SAIC) have to overcome if they want to hire fresh, young talent to keep their businesses operational.
We have an advantage in the STEM initiative, however, that you might not realize. That advantage is the video game. Kids play video games, lots of video games. When I was a kid, my parents took great steps to make sure we never SAW video games. Why? Video games are viewed with a negative cultural attitude which says that they encourage laziness, lack of producivity, and epiliepsy. The video game industry is a multi-billion dollar industry that is not just about entertainment, is it? Take a look at these two videos from my recent trip to I/ITSEC in Orlando last December, and decide for yourself. This first video is about the game Moonbase Alpha, developed by NASA (with the help of Caputo's Corner friend Jonathan Gleason) and available for free download here.
This second video is of the common driver trainer built by SAIC, used in military training simulations.
Notice that both of these clips make heavy use of 3D video game technology, the same technology that drives just about any first person shooter game you can think of. When I showed these clips to my classes, I first asked them how many of them played video games. Nearly all of them raised their hands. When I showed the kids these videos, they all watched captively, and you could clearly see at least a few kids' jaws drop completely on the floor...kind of like this.
Needless to say, given how much kids interact with technology as it is, it really does not take much to get kids excited about perhaps working in the very same industries that develop the games that they play for fun.
Let me just say a few things about I/ITSEC before I close today. I/ITSEC is the Interservice/Industry Training Simulation and Education Conference. I attended in December, just before I started the blog. Most of the vendors on the exhibit floor are from government agencies, military, and military contractors showing off the latest and greatest advances in the modeling and simulation industry. Most of the products are marketed toward military use, but every year they give a group a teachers from around the country a chance to walk the floor, play with the technology, and take something back to their classrooms to show to the kids to get them excited about science. I was very fortunate to be one of 7 teachers selected from around the country to attend under the America's Teachers banner. Now, they are very sensitive about who can and can't take pictures, so I didn't push my luck there (especially considering we saw at least two indivduals escorted off the floor for having contraband...i.e. cameras). However, there are several more of those videos like the two above on the NTSA Youtube page. Check it out.
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