Budget cuts and bureaucracy have kept engineering equipment from our nation’s schools, so a scrappy Stanford team is taking a truck chock-full of fun tools to the students themselves. SparkTruck literally parks a engineering bench outside of schools, let’s students play with the latest in maker technology, and has managed to have a measurable impact on students’ path towards a career in science.
“The maker movement has the potential to deeply engage kids in creatively using the math, the science, the other skills that they’ve learned, to build real things and see the connection between what they’re doing in schools and the real world applications,” says Joanna Weiss, the Secretary of Education’s Chief of Staff, who watched SparkTruck launch their nation-wide road trip at the annual Aspen Ideas Festival*.
“We believe that if we can get kids to make things and take them home, they’ll start thinking of themselves as makers that can create real impact in the world,” writes co-founder Jason Chua. For many students, science is a textbook, a brick of words and brightly colored images, which only has use in preparing them for a multiple choice test. One survey of student attitudes towards STEM found that “it is almost universal that mathematics and science is seen as boring and not related to real life” [PDF].
The maker movement, a trend towards mass, amateur engineering, is like Legos on steroids, complete with 3d printers, circuit boards, and anything else a child would need to create their toys from scratch.
SparkTruck sounds nice, but does it work? Stanford Education PhD student and resident researcher Kathayoon Khalil finds that students exposed to the SparkTruck glory see a sizable increase in how they identify themselves as builders (39% vs. 56%), which some psychological evidence suggests is a reliable predictor of actual behavior change. Khalil estimates that around 1-2 out of 100 students will pursue a STEM major in college as a result of SparkTruck. It may not sound like much, but educational interventions are usually (disappointingly) tiny.
One longitudinal study found that experience with high school scientific research bumped the actual decision to choose a career in science about 13%. SparkTruck is only an afternoon with some fun tools. So, as far as workable solutions go, it’s a relatively solid (and inexpensive) solution.
Check out SparkTruck’s road trip guide here.
*Disclosure: I consult for the Aspen Institute on a separate government innovation-related conference.
It seems that tablets being used in our education system are becoming more commonplace these days. To that effect, the San Diego Unified School District has recently purchased about 26,000 iPads that will be making its way into the hands of its students this fall, thus making it one of the largest programs to date. This is part of a voter-approved funding program known as “Proposition S”, which basically sets funds aside that will allow technology in the classroom to remain up to date. No word on what sort of software the district will be utilizing, but some are speculating that it could use Apple’s iBooks 2 which has been enhanced for textbooks. The iPads will mainly be utilized in 5th and 8th grade classrooms as well as some high school classes. So if you’re a parent whose kids are attending any of the schools in the San Diego Unified School District, it looks like your kids are in for a treat this fall.
