STEM Innovators

STEM Innovators

When reading chapter 3, STEM innovators I was impressed by the drive that these young people had.  I started thinking about what drives a young person to be able to come up with the persistence to keep going and succeed.  So maybe play comes into “play” here.  When children are young we encourage them to play with hands on materials, as they grow older their play seems to become gaming systems.  Most of the success stories in this book don’t seem to focus on computer enhanced play but on hands on play.  How can a child build if they never touch?  I think about my own children and realize that while they did have the gaming system I kept it in a place where it wasn’t always available and there were times when they had to do “hands on” play.  Board games like Monopoly and Life give opportunities to have conversations about buying houses, paying bills, and managing a family.  Unexpected things happen in life and the conversations that we had about this was invaluable to them.  From a young age, my son said “I want to design video games”, I encouraged him to have a backup plan.  He wanted and I felt he needed to go to college to get his degree but a typical four year university would not have worked for him.  He found an independent college called Neumont University where he could be successful.  This college takes PBL and integrates it into their curriculum, they give opportunities for students to do real world projects for real companies.  This gives companies the opportunity to see what students can do and many get job offers from these companies upon graduation.  I am sure that there are other schools who also do this and I believe we need to encourage our students to think outside the South Carolina box for college opportunities.

As South Carolina and Greenville County schools grow and offer more opportunities for our students to become fluent in PBL and as companies become vested in our students and their projects I hope this isn’t always the case.  I feel that the more companies see what our students can do, the better possibility our students will have to be marketable.  

As my first year in a PBL school continues I realize that I need to do a better job of trying to get my students to be persistent.  This will make them more marketable.  This may be a year long struggle as many just want to know if they have the right answer!  Manu Kapur, from Singapore talks about how struggle triggers deeper understanding.  So my goal has become to give my students opportunities to struggle productively.  By letting them struggle and encouraging them to think outside the box I think they can realize how much they know and how far they can go and what they can do with this knowledge.  I need to give them opportunities to validate that struggle can be productive and persistence will pay off in the long run.  Failure is a part of learning and it needs to be embraced not feared.  Now I wonder how I can give them the opportunity to fail the first time (or many times) and still be “successful” with their grade since that does drive so many.  If failure is a part of learning and not all learn at the same pace or at the same time, we need a grading system that takes this into place and allows a teacher to change past grades to allow students to fail, to be persistent, and to succeed.  To succeed on their timeline and not on a nine week schedule.  In life deadlines are pushed because the first attempt didn’t work and users changed requirements.