By Dave Janosz, on March 12th, 2011 The profession I most closely identify with has been challenged since I’ve entered into it, perhaps longer, with an identity crisis. This is not surprising; I believe that many others in education are hard-pressed to articulate why they teach what they teach. To me, this discussion is very much about identifying the personal quality that one wants to develop in young children. Language arts and English teachers strive to develop literacy in young people. Physical education teachers strive to teach lifelong physical fitness.
Most in my profession have wanted to hang their hats on the term “technological literacy,” especially since the release of the National Standards for Technological Literacy by the ITEEA in 2001. Is technological literacy a personal quality? Yes. Is it measurable? Well, yes, but many would set out to measure someone’s proficiency using Microsoft Word in an effort to describe a young person’s “technological literacy.” Unfortunately, the time when my profession could have captured this term and made it their own has long since sailed away.
“Design” is a pretty understandable term, but it is not a personal quality. It’s more a verb or activity and also sounds like something art teachers teach. I’ve taught many students over the years about the design loop or the other design processes, but I’d rather hang my hat on a personal quality as an outcome of teaching.
Some like to use the term “engineering.” Does “engineering” describe a great deal of what we teach and how we teach it? Yes, but engineering (the verb) doesn’t describe everything that I’d want children to develop through their education. Add to that the fact that engineering is the title of a very specific profession and you might see the problem with widespread adoption of the term as something desirable in every school for every student. Further, engineering is not really a measurable personal quality.
“Innovation” also sounds like a desirable thing. But, I’m not sure that you could call innovation a personal quality. An innovation to me is more of a thing, a noun. Yes, there is a describable process behind the term and I want young people to learn to innovate, but innovation really isn’t a personal quality. Beyond that, innovation seems to have become pretty cliche in the current common vernacular.
There has been a recent rally around the term “STEM” in the realm of education among those in and around my profession. Is it a very laudable goal that we should be striving toward to have more integrated learning especially at the high school level? Absolutely. But, that may be the best thing that will ever come from the acronym that as far as I can tell was first conceived as a way to organize funding streams instead of as a way to make interdisciplinary connections. I’d also rather not describe what I’m about in terms of the acronym du jour, which will surely fade into the next catchy acrostic invention.
This brings me to the term “ingenuity,” the namesake of this blog. Every student should be spending time in school developing their ingenuity, and lots of it. Looking at some dictionary definitions of the term I find that it is a personal quality. It’s a term that can be used in conjunction with talent. There’s an outcome to be had from applying it. Perhaps we haven’t yet found the most effective way to measure it in an educational setting, but in my heart of hearts I believe that it’s just as measurable as one’s physical fitness. One can challenge themselves to develop their ingenuity and they can also put it on display in a competitive setting.
So, fifteen years into my education career, I think I’ve decided on the term that I’m going to “be about” and promote it’s development in our young people. I want my own children to develop their ingenuity because I think it will make them every bit as successful in life as almost anything else. I want the young people of our nation to develop their ingenuity because I think it’s what has always set us apart from others and I think that will continue. I want others around the world to develop their ingenuity because with ingenuity becomes independence.
By Dave Janosz, on February 12th, 2011 Most Americans can name and recognize six American Idol television show winners before they could these six individuals:
Mark Zuckerberg
Sergey Brin
Larry Page
Steve Chen
Chad Hurley
Jawed Karim
What do these thirty-something men have in common? They invented the ways we are living our lives online. Zuckerberg founded Facebook, Brin and Page founded Google, and Chen, Hurley, and Karim invented YouTube. What else do they have in common? They all brought these things into our consciousness based originally on projects they developed relatively early in their lives…a graduate school project…a side project while an undergrad…in a garage with others they met at one of their first jobs or in college.
What’s wrong with this picture? There’s not a woman, an African American, nor a Hispanic American among them.
Another thing these guys have in common is that they were all within the past few years sitting in a public high school somewhere in the United States receiving an education. I wonder what they would each say about how their school experience helped them in their career endeavors. I understand that Chad Hurley was involved in the Technology Student Association when he was in high school. I’m not trying to suggest that his involvement in TSA alone was the key to his success, yet one would have to admit that that the goals of Technology Education and TSA are closely aligned to the development of students’ ingenuity.
I also should not suggest that young people idolize these individuals. Just as we shouldn’t teach young people to idolize professional athletes, we shouldn’t teach them to idolize anyone in the media as everyone has their faults including these people I’m sure. But, if we teach young people to idolize anything, let’s make it the ideals of ingenuity, and let’s teach them the lessons of how these relatively young people were able to bring their ideas to the forefront and literally change the world.
By , on February 4th, 2011 At Heritage Middle School in Livingston NJ, the concept of the “FemGineers”, the all female design and engineering team happened by accident: Two sign up lists were placed on a lab table, one for the Technology Student Association, the other for the National Engineers’ Week Future City Competition. Students signed up during the day in their technology education class and at the end of the day I reviewed the lists. I found that on the Future City sign up sheet, all but one student were female. I approached the eighth grade boy and asked him if he did what he meant to do. Being an eighth grade boy, he quickly switched to the TSA team.
The first meeting of the Future City team was held and before long, nine eighth graders realized “We’re all girls.” They quickly embraced the concept, choosing a name and even designing a logo. The first year, they competed they earned a seventh place finish and an honorable mention at the New Jersey Regional. The concept of the FemGineers was off the ground. Building and district administration really supported the concept. They talked it up at parent meetings and student activity fairs.
These young ladies had found a new home: the technology education lab. They wasted no time in telling me that the room reminded them of “grandpa’s basement”…dirty, machines everywhere, nothing to make you feel welcome. They suggested as a start that they could repaint the door with a technology related mural. They did so, and added a splash of color to an otherwise monotone room.
The next year, the club grew to more than 30 girls. They again competed in the Future City challenge and placed 2nd with other honorable mentions. These girls too said that they would never have “just wandered in” to the technology lab if they did not have a friend who told them about it. When I asked what we should do, again, they wanted to paint murals on the walls, which they did, but they had another novel idea: “The Innovation Station”. They wanted to design an area that you could see from the door that would invite people into the room. At that time, there was simply drill presses and scroll saws. The Innovation Station would have couches, ottomans, beanbag chairs and large tables that would have dry erase surfaces so you could draw ideas out in an innovative setting.
Through the use of student input and a suspension of what I thought I knew about gender equity, we were able to create an innovative, creative environment that is student focused and gender neutral. It is about so much more than simply painting it pink.
You can read more about the FemGineers at:
Building Utopia: You Go Girl!
We Built This City
FemGineers Video
By , on February 4th, 2011 The Thomas Edison Muckers website celebrates the inventive and entrepreneurial spirit. It is the product of the Edison Innovation Foundation, a nonprofit organization that supports the Edison legacy and encourages students to embrace careers in science, technology, and engineering; and is committed to educating the next generation of great innovators. Through a long-term contract with the National Park Service, the Foundation raises funds for the upkeep, restoration, and expansion of the Thomas Edison National Historical Park, in West Orange, NJ, its numerous artifacts, and new educational programs for students, teachers, and the general public.
By Dave Janosz, on February 1st, 2011 Let’s set something straight for young people. Serendipitous inventions are not for the most part accidents. There is a lot more to the ingenuity behind their development.
In schools we might tell students about the accidental discovery of penicillin. But, while the effects were in fact fortuitously discovered in 1928 by Alexander Fleming, it wasn’t until World War II until significant life-saving results were achieved and the drug was being mass-produced. Read the Wikipedia entry for penicillin; dozens of people had a hand in taking the important steps, which tells me that hundreds probably worked on it. This doesn’t sound too accidental to me.
One can read all about Spencer Silver and Art Fry as the inventors of the Post-it note. Yet, as far as I can read Silver invented a low-tack re-positionable adhesive and Fry applied that solution to a bookmark. The story goes that Silver was actually trying to develop a very strong adhesive, but I have trouble finding a good source for that part of the story.
Read more about the development of the Post-it and you’ll find more about its far from accidental development. Silver thought his adhesive would make for a great spray or coating, but those ideas weren’t recognized as marketable by the company. Thanks to the promotion of the practice “bootlegging” by the 3M Company, which was the encouragement of people stepping out of their own work and departments to find out what others in the company were doing, Art Fry found an application for the adhesive. He thought it could be a good solution for keeping bookmarks in his hymnal book at church. It took another few years of internal promotion at 3M, another five years to perfect the product specifications and manufacture it. Ultimately, this story of ingenuity has led to over 4000 Post-it Brand products today.
Let’s make sure that young people don’t learn about these types of developments as strictly fortuitous or accidental. Let’s encourage them to look deeper into things to instead find that they are the results of hard work over long periods of time by many different people of various backgrounds.
Update: 2/22/11 – Here’s an interesting article on HowStuffWorks.com about ten “accidental” inventions.
By Dave Janosz, on January 25th, 2011 About the first thirty minutes of President Obama’s State of the Union Speech tonight was dedicated to innovation, education, and infrastructure.
I don’t take lightly how the president interwove these themes with education and our schools. I especially noted this reference to the teaching of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM): “And over the next ten years, with so many Baby Boomers retiring from our classrooms, we want to prepare 100,000 new teachers in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and math.”
I admire the goal; it’s a very laudable one. However, so many people do not yet realize the power of the two middle parts of the STEM acronym and the value added to a student’s experience when they study them along with mathematics and science. Though they are hard to find and it may not be true in every school, most schools math and science departments are staffed with people that are very capable of teaching those subjects. What we do not have is enough people to teach our students about technology, engineering, and ingenuity.
Also prominent in this first segment of the speech were themes of entrepreneurship, manufacturing, how technology has revolutionized our lives, global competition, creativity and imagination, clean energy, infrastructure, and invention. Our students need to know about these things too, but there is really no time left in their math and science classes to learn something meaningful about these other important topics.
The president also made reference to Sputnik and how it led us to transform our education system and research and development.
If we’re going to reinvent ourselves and reinvent our nation, we cannot do it with the same education system that came out of the post-Sputnik era. While giving our kids more experiences in learning math and science were great things to come out of that era, we need to build on that for the future. Our education system needs more in the way of instruction in Technology and Engineering, which is core to developing ingenuity of our young people.
Here where I live in New Jersey, we have set a strong foundation for these studies. We’ve also engaged engineers, architects, industrial designers, and other professionals and showed them a path to sharing their knowledge and experience with children. Let’s build on that and truly reinvent education with study of Technology and Engineering at the core.
By Dave Janosz, on January 22nd, 2011 I’m writing this post for the first time from my new iPad. This device and Harry Roman’s post about Edison and R&D got me thinking about the process of invention and how its changed over the past century.
During Edison’s era, he made innovation happen in a unique way for that time. Having people of various backgrounds, experience, and expertise became the standard for research and development in industry and you can see the evidence of that in the iPad. While how exactly this product was developed and by whom remains an industry secret and a mystery to most all of us, one thing is certain: I imagine that hundreds of people had a hand in it’s development.
I imagine that the following types of people were involved in creating the iPad:
– Industrial Designers
– Engineers
– Marketing Professionals
– Manufacturers
– Software Developers
– Other industry professionals that had experience with original devices that failed in the market (reminder: iPad wasn’t the first of this concept)
Our young people need to learn about ingenuity is how it is applied by teams regardless of scale or market consciousness of a project. They need first hand experience being a team member as well as a team leader so they can begin to understand the dynamics of team work.
One interesting thing to me is how the credit for innovative products gets passed by the public. People seem to credit Edison alone for the invention of the incandescent light bulb. Yet, today the “inventor” of the iPad is Apple. I wonder if over time we’ll remember the companies as the inventors of things rather than the individuals the way we used to.
By Dave Janosz, on January 19th, 2011 The first time I heard of William Kamkwamba was when he appeared on the Daily Show back in October 2009, shortly after his book The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind was published. To hear even a brief part of the story about how William had constructed a wind powered turbine in his village in Malawi set me out to buy the book. I remember him pondering during the interview, “where was Google all this time?” To read the entire book, however, set me out to change my perspective on student motivation among some other ideas related to ingenuity.
William had started to develop the wind turbine at age fourteen. But, more interesting than that were the events that led up to that point in time. Not every child in Malawi goes to school. William was one that understood the opportunity he had when his family was able to enroll him in a primary school. He was a hard worker in school and seems to have appreciated every bit of knowledge that came his way through his formal education experience.
By about the time he finished the eighth grade in 2001-02, severe famine had struck the country. His family, being agrarian, could no longer support the fees required for William to keep attending school. The book describes in great detail how William and his family got through those two years, surviving on just a few bites of food, if even that, per day.
The first thing we can learn from William’s story is about motivation. The severe famine that had hit and the hunger pains he literally felt made him wonder about solutions to the problem. He thought that if he could find a way to irrigate the crops that he could help solve the problem. But, to do that you’d need power to pump the water. So, William was more motivated to solve a problem than perhaps anyone could possibly be.
When William set out to learn about energy and power he came across several textbooks on related topics. I think many people miss the true genius of William. It wasn’t as if the text materials he read contained a set of plans that explained how he could build a wind turbine from materials laying around a village in a developing country. What William did was he applied the sort of ingenuity I wish every one of our children could develop. He read about the concepts and then set out to find the things that fit his needs…an old bicycle dynamo to serve as the generator…old automobile parts and metal garnered from trips to the scrap yard…some other tools and parts from his father’s farming materials and others from around the house. From these “unusable,” even in a developing country, items he fashioned a full power generation system complete with a circuit breaker. Imagine the pride and delight he must have felt when the family radio powered up for the first time with electricity from his wind turbine.
Our young people can learn a lot from an individual like William Kamkwamba and the stories he has to tell. I’d say the book is definitely appropriate for a high school level student on up through adults.
You can also learn more about William in his own words from this TED Talk and this short documentary called Moving Windmills.
By , on January 11th, 2011 The processes of invention and project management are very similar, and both are very important to the world of business. An inventor manages a complex project or process involving manpower, money, resources, and time schedules, just like an engineer would do when they create a new product or design and construct a new building or bridge. The inventive process is inherently STEM-based, requiring the inventor/engineer to think in a multi-dimensional and multi-disciplinary fashion. Since project management is a highly prized skill in the world of work, having kids involved in inventive activities is a highly relevant school-to-work activity. This is exactly the kind of thinking the business world will demand of employees.
Give young people a big jump start in the business world and help them better understand project management as a lesson of ingenuity. Here are some ideas for the classroom:
1) Integrate the business aspects of inventive thought into their activities. Engineers and inventors don’t invent because they can, but because there is an economic incentive to do so. When they are involved in an invention challenge, make sure they discuss the economics and marketing aspects and intellectual property of the invention.
2) After they conceive of a new product or invention, have them take some time to think like a project manager and identify the kinds of skills they will need on their project team to bring the invention/product to market.
3) Invite project managers and inventors to act as role models for students and to stimulate discussion about the value of invention and new product development. Also, the invited project managers and inventors can serve to discuss the educational skills necessary to hold these positions.
By , on January 11th, 2011 In July 2009, four students from High Point Regional High School earned first place in the United States at the Technology Student Association (TSA) National Conference in Denver for their invention to prevent the formation of bed sores in hospital patients. While the next step taken most student groups after competitions is to store the project in a classroom or bedroom closet, these four students were challenged to take their innovation and work towards a United States patent application.
When they returned in September, the students embarked on a year long process to organize, research, and dedicate the time necessary to pursue this application. Primary responsibilities included frequent fund-raising, daily documentation of new developments, thorough searches through Google patents, the formation of a LLC called No Gadget Too Complicated, the opening of bank accounts, and the scheduling of several meetings with local and state officials who the students thought could help them with their pursuits. These discussions included face to face meetings with local hospital officials, local elected officials, bed sore patients, and local business owners. Frequent Skype calls with their consultant, a venture capitalist and their judge from the TSA Conference in Denver, also took place.
With help from a New Jersey state Senator, Steven Oroho, the students connected with a patent attorney, Michael Doherty, also a state Senator, who worked with them to file the official patent application in March 2010. The students have signed a Rights of First Agreement with Covidien, a medical company in Massachusetts who provided the final funding and support to secure the costs of the patent attorney. The students presented at the 2010 TSA National Conference in Baltimore about their experience, at the New Jersey Technology Council Expo in April 2010, and will be featured on NJEA’s Classroom Close-up this spring. They continue to work on their innovation today as they take the steps necessary to scale up the marketing and scope of their design.
The importance of intellectual property law and its role in our society is an important lesson as we try to develop the ingenuity of our youth. There is no better way to learn a process such as this than to actually experience it first hand. The students have also learned important lessons about financing and capital, the legal aspects of starting a business, and research and development, all of which should be taught more directly in our schools.
You can read more about the student team in this NJ Herald article.
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