The Sunday Gazette
Mr. Daniel Beck
Mr. Arthur Clayman
In response to “Letting business shape K-12 curriculum is terrible idea”.
On December 8th, we had a rookie team that is going to participate in the FIRST Robotics Competition in for the full day at our shop, the ‘IC’ ( the Kell Robotics Innovation Center ) in Kennesaw Georgia.
They rode a school bus 200 miles, one way to get there. They thought they were coming to learn just some technical things, but a lot of time and energy was spent on personal and team development, problem solving, ownership of problems and processes, design process, and other things. These are a few of the things that make a team successful and the personal skills developed are valuable to future employers.
They volunteered to come 200 miles, from a Title I school, on a Saturday, to learn things that engage them academically and intellectually, and move them toward becoming successful members of society. During the next few years they will mature, and find motivation and interests that many of their peers will not find. For some of them, December 8th, 2012 is the day their compass became aligned, they decided they were going to become better students and find out what they wanted to do with their career. They found a respite from the academic treadmill and discovered they can do something exciting, relevant, important, and fun.
Criticizing schools for allowing students to build a “basketball playing robot” exposes a deep misunderstanding of what it takes to accomplish this task. It requires a high degree of critical thinking, teamwork, problem solving, and other tasks that educators strive to accomplish in the classroom through “manufactured academic exercises”. It reminds one of the scene from the movie where Rodney Dangerfield is in a business class. Producing a robot to do a task like play basketball well is really tough and not unlike the challenges students will face in their career after school.
Educators work to prepare students to pursue hundreds of careers, from law, medicine, mechanics, construction, education, and so on. For the most part it is done in the classroom. Imagine that we prepared football players the same way we prepared these other students. We could teach them how to play football from a textbook, physically condition them in a gym class, and save all the cost and bother of having football programs after school. “You mean we could prepare athletes for NCAA and NFL and save all that time and money”. Unfortunately we train students the same way for other fields.
For thousands of years there has been a student/mentor apprenticeship process. The modern world has lost this old world process. If we are going to make progress in education, we have to reconnect students with mentors from outside the classroom, through competitions such as robotics, summer internships in business, and other activities that motivate and excite students about what they are doing in the classroom. The goal of the educational process is to help produce educated competent members of society. Test scores are an outcome of the process, not the ultimate goal. If we do not engage students in mentor based programs like robotics and other STEM and non-stem programs, we will abandon millions of students to spending years looking for ways to get their career started.
Ed Barker
Assistant Director of Advance Computing
Kennesaw State University, Kennesaw Georgia
Director, The Carlton J. Kell Robotics Team, aka Kell Robotics
Full disclosure: A major sponsor of Kell Robotics is the General Electric Company, Infrastructure, Energy