STEM Innovators

I just spent the last hour and fifteen minutes watching the Last Lecture of Randy Pausch, who was Shanna Tellerman's Carnegie Mellon professor of  computer science. Wow! What a teacher! Now I feel that I'm ready to write about the STEM innovators chapter.

I see the type of professor that Pausch was at Carnegie Mellon as a facilitator much as the ideal PBL teacher should be. The course that Shanna had taken was a PBL course where all that the students did was explore their interests in programming for virtual reality. His role was to act as cheerleader and coach rather than as a deliverer of content or knowledge. His childhood dreams acted as the glue to hold his talk together, how to inspire others to achieve their dreams. He said that one must decide whether one is Tigger or Eeyore, and that choice was one that for him was easy to make, energetic and enthusiastic as he was. I imagine that Shanna caught the enthusiasm bug just by being in his classes. 

Shanna went on to found a company that dealt in virtual reality and three-d design. First she tried first responder software, and then eventually her small company was bought by Autodesk. She indicated that her best moments were when she was able to collaborate with creative people to work on difficult projects. That is what we PBL teachers are trying to facilitate in our students, the sense of belonging to a group and of  moving toward a purpose and goal with that group. Some of our students will be able to work with others better than some; our goal as PBL teachers is to nurture the sense of purpose, much as what Shanna felt as she was working in her groups.

The other interesting person the author discusses in this chapter was the young man who wished to provide malaria nets to African countries. David was an extremely well-rounded individual who attended Harvard. He had not much at all to say about his classes there but he indicated that the out of school experiences there formed more the basis for his eventual life work than the classes he had taken. He said that following his passion was the most important lesson he learned. He flet that his classes needed more emphasis on translating learning into social action and businesses. This is what we need to instill into out PBL students in high school, that the learning is more about the doing than the knowing. We can have the students look up all kinds of factoids and learn about the world, or we can have them DO something that will move them in the direction of social action or of beginning business activities which will lead to lifetime learning.