STEM Education Is Job One

Chris Roe: Matt is obviously with our lead sponsor, our presenting sponsor, which we're very pleased about. Matt is Chevron's manager of Global Partnerships and Programs, which is, he's in charge of Chevron's major programs around the world. He also serves as the president of Chevron's foundations. In 2010, Chevron Social Investments succeeded $180 million, with the primary focus on health, education and economic development. Among Matt's accomplishments, he has spearheaded Chevron's global health efforts in the area of HIV/AIDS and maternal and child health, including a major partnership with the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria and led Chevron's California Partnership, a significant investment to support science, technology, engineering and math. Not surprising. In addition, Matt has directed Chevron through a number of disaster relief efforts in Myanmar, China, Gulf Coast, Haiti and elsewhere and overseas the company's employee community involvement partnerships. Matt has been a featured speaker on corporate philanthropy and is a recognized expert in the area of public-private partnerships and social investment and development. Formally a practicing attorney, Matt is a graduate of San Francisco State University and earned a law degree from the University of San Francisco School of Law. So with that, I'm gonna turn it over to Matt and the panel. Thank you Matt. Matt Lonner: You know, hearing it, I have a pretty impressive resume for someone who took no coursework in STEM in college. So I guess there are anomalies out there. A lot has been said already about this issue. The bureau of Labor Statistics projects job growth of 22% for STEM occupations as a whole for 2014. That's pretty impressive number, considering where the economy is. They also note that STEM workers earn wages that are 70% above the national averages. Yet, whether it's McKinsey Global Institute or Gallup, both CEOs large and small-business owners have difficulties finding workers with the right skills to fill an estimated 3.2 million open jobs in the United States. Certainly at odds with what we're hearing and reading in the paper. Few factors are more critical to California's competitiveness and a robust supply chain than a supply of college graduates with degrees and science, technology, engineering and math. We see this firsthand at Chevron, where much of the work supporting the company's success involves research and projects of great scale and complexity, technically and from a project-management standpoint. In fact, you know when I think of STEM, we use it as a way to define science, technology, engineering and math, but when Chris talks about applied learning, I see it in the context of see, touch, experience and master. Those are the kinds of individuals we need at Chevron. We are a California-based company, as I said. In 2009-2010, we invested over $10 million in STEM education in California, reaching 3,900 teachers and 245,000 students. Yet, it's still not enough. This panel works for the dichotomy that our state faces between record unemployment on the one hand and business-recruitment challenges on the other. Our panelists provide a perspective on evolving workforce needs and the strategies required to ensure all California students are graduating from high school, college-ready and career-bound with the skills needed to succeed in the California economy. It's my pleasure to introduce our panelists. First, Roberta Gotfried is the Director of Engineering Learning and University Relations at Raytheon Space and Airborne Systems. Previously she was a director of technology strategy and integration and engineering fellow specializing in information in cyber security. Roberta inherited some of the early research initiative in this field at Raytheon. Over the last two decades, she had led research to improve security in the involving net-centric battle space, working with the U.S. Department of Defense, NATO and the UK Ministry of Defence, spelled with a C. Linda Katehi is a chancellor of UC Davis, where she oversees all aspects of the university's teaching, research and public service mission, as well as holding UC Davis faculty appointments in electrical and computer engineering and in women and gender studies. A member of the National Academy of Engineering, Linda chaired the 2010, until 2010, the president's committee for the National Medal of Science and is the chair of the Secretary of Commerce's committee for the National Medal of Technology and Innovation. She's also a fellow and board member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and was elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the world's most prestigious honorary societies. Van Ton-Quinlivan is the vice chancellor of Economic and Workforce Development for the California Community College system and director of workforce development at PG&E. While at PG&E, Van created Power Pathway, a nationally recognized best-practice model program in workforce development. In 2010, Van was selected as one of the 10 industry leaders to inform the education training subcommittee of president Obama's Economic Recovery Advisory Board on the workforce needs of industry. She is one of five corporate leaders invited to attend the first ever White House Community College Summit. Earlier this year, she spoke at the inaugural U.S.-Canada-European Commission Trilateral Roundtable on the topic of the employment dimension of the transition to a green economy and participated in the inaugural Clinton Global Initiative America meeting in June. Leroy Tripette currently serves at the external affairs manager for Intel's Corporate Affairs Group. In this role, he is responsible for the development, coordination and implementation of strategic community and education programs and grants that promote science, technology, engineering and math which stands for Person in audience: STEM. Lonner: Oh my God. It was just a check to see if you were with me all the way. So come on perk up. The boards need you. He also manages comprehensive relationships with school districts and universities and nonprofit organizations. Mr. Tripette has been with Intel for 16 years and has held numerous software engineering and technical project-management positions prior to joining corporate affairs in 2003. Please welcome all of our panelists. Alright, so why don't we start with the premise that predicated this panel and maybe start with Roberta and Leroy. Why are STEM skills so vital to employers and what do you see as the biggest gaps in the skills and preparation among young current applicants and new employees? And you can include among that current employees as well. Roberta Gotfried: Is this on? Yes. As a--well Raytheon, for everyone who knows, is an aerospace and defense company and our space is airborne systems. So our products for the most part are sensors and aircraft and systems that we use for homeland security and to defend the nation. And STEM, the science, technology and engineering and math, are really a basis for the vast majority of all of our employees. We are always struggling to find an adequate number of applicants who can fill the need and deliver not just products that we need today but products that have never been developed before. So we need people who not just understand the sciences and the basic material but actually can think creatively and innovatively to be able to picture what a solution might look like for something that has never existed before. So it's a matter of thinking about--out of the box for envisioning, for taking a need that, you know, that's expressed and communicated by someone in the government or in the user space and to try to picture how you can take different aspects of engineering and technology and put it together in new ways to meet a need to defend the nation. In addition to just the numbers, we heard speakers earlier talk about underrepresented organizations. You know, it's funny that I'm here, as a woman, but we're always struggling to get women in underrepresented populations to be able to have a diverse employee and workforce. Because with more diversity we really produce better products. So it's a mindset, it's people who understand the technology, it's people also who understand not just a narrow point of view and a narrow body of knowledge but who can work together and bring together different fields in order to produce a new product. Lonner: Let's expand on that for a moment before we go to you Leroy. You said kind of a broader knowledge. You know, what about for students who are entering college and they have no intention of entering technical fields, does an emphasis on STEM provide you with any kind of value beyond the technical jobs that you're looking to fill? For either of you. Leroy Tripette: Alright, is this thing working? Okay. I think the answer to that is yes. I mean science, technology, engineering and math, or STEM as we love to break it down to, those are foundational educational segments that I think can be applied across the board. And that's why you get more to looking, not necessarily as STEM skills but getting back to that buzz word now of 21st century learning skills. Being able to work collaboratively, being able to understand ambiguity, as was mentioned earlier. Looking more at these things that aren't toward repetitive jobs, physical labor type jobs but really knowledge-based thinking and these STEM fields, these STEM areas I think give you foundations that can be applied across the spectrum. Case in point, computer science degree holder here that is now working in public affairs. Lonner: You want to add to that? Tripette: Well I think, going back to the initial question, Roberta, I echo a lot of her comments as far as why STEM is so important to us. With Intel, obviously, major technology company, our bread and butter of course the central process units, microprocessors that go inside of most of the laptops and servers that you see out there today. And if I look at what we could do to address the issue that was asked earlier as far as the gap, the one thing I would add is teachers, teachers, teachers, teachers. That is the foundation from the K-12 to the postsecondary area of what needs to be there, who needs to have the critical understanding to be able to educate the workforce. So it's finding those opportunities to collaborate from the industry standpoint, providing curriculum that the higher-ed teachers can then use to keep students up to date on the latest and greatest technologies, or at least understanding the foundation so that they are able to think outside the box and create that next big thing that we don't even know exists today. And I think the other piece is, looking at the K-12 area, effective use of technology in the classroom. I know that was one of the other things that was pointed out earlier. So leveraging programs like Intel Teach the Future, which does just that and I'm happy to report that we hit the 10 million teachers trained point this year. So 10 million teachers that we have gone out around the world and taught effective use of technology in the classroom. And that's also why looking at something else that Chris mentioned a minute ago the Thousand K and 10 Initiative. Intel is also a founding member of that effort as well, because we realize and understand the importance of arming the classroom today with effective teachers that can build that workforce for tomorrow. Lonner: Roberta, I know that Raytheon has invested a lot in human capital issues as well and not just financial capital and I'm curious, beyond private investment as we traditionally understand it, where do you think the private sector can play a role in driving change? Gotfried: Right. Well one of the things that we've done in, or the way in which our investment has taken form is that we try to reach out and actually touch students in the, I think we've been focusing more on the middle school through our Math Moves You Foundations. And actually get students hands on involved in working on engineering projects. A lot of, we have hundreds of engineers from Raytheon who are out there in the schools tutoring students as well as leading and guiding students in the robotics and other fields. So the idea is to actually engage students in interactive problems that kept them excited, that makes them actually see what engineering is that how you translate from math and science into engineering to produce something that a team of students can then be proud of. Whether it's rocketry or robots or building a new, if you're familiar with the Sum of All Thrills ride at Epcot Center, where every rider gets to design how the ride is gonna work for them. So those are, we're taking that and actually reaching out not just to the people but in ways that students can really relate to. Lonner: Great, thank you. Question for our two chancellors, Linda and Van. Increasingly groups like CSL Net are defining STEM as an applied and interdisciplinary or even a multidisciplinary approach. Do you agree with this? And if so, how can schools and colleges respond to the need to offer STEM in this manner given the constraints of finance and historical focus on the disciplines? And let me add, I mean I think one of the true dichotomies of this entire dialogue is on the one hand, a public education system that is seriously challenged, to say the least, for K through 12 and yet, we have arguably the best system of higher education in the world in the United States and among them, the UC and CSU system as among the best representations of public education in the world. So how do you reconcile these two dichotomies and what can the university and college system do to address the issue? Van Ton-Quinlivan: I want to address that in a long kind of a roundabout way by bringing up a statistic on what is happening to the world of work. So between 1973 and 2007, our country grew jobs by 61 million, sorry, 63 million. So we went from 91 million and added another 63 million. However, if you only had a high school education or less, there were two million less jobs for you in 2007. So one of the factors that has happened is that careers that used to be non-STEM jobs actually became STEM based jobs. And in my prior life, I was head of my own company's 20,000 person workforce and I began to see this obsolescence happen. And let me just give you a case in point, you know that California has a very aggressive energy policies and one of the areas that we have been pushing as a state and so we'll be ahead of the other countries is in terms of use of hybrid vehicles and electric vehicles. What that has effectively done is taken a category or classification of careers that you traditionally know as mechanics, mechanics of combustion cars and we're gonna make them into STEM fields. So electric vehicles, hybrid vehicles are all based on, you need to know fundamentals of electricity, you need to know computers and technology, it's an entirely different way of maintaining and working on those cars. So in one generation starting from 2011, the mechanics that we know now will become obsolete because they will need STEM skills in the future. So how do you take a population that may have not so much interest in STEM skills and then transition them to this new world? So to discuss how we did that with the mechanics with my company, it was interesting, we thought well we can give them principles of electricity or you know, math 101 or technology 101 and all of these would have, really just failed in terms of interest from the workers. However, if you were to repackage it in a form of you know, fundamentals of electric vehicles and hybrid vehicles maintenance, then it was all very interesting. So I think the talent or what you're asking is how do we actually use resources, existing resources? Part of the answer is contextualizing the STEM learning into something that the individuals find relevant, especially for the skills of tomorrow. So thanks for my roundabout answer. Lonner: Appreciate it. Linda Katehi: I would like to take a different perspective in your question. So what is STEM? STEM really is a collection of disciplines. I mean it's a collection that we've made as we are trying to help ourselves understand human life or life in general, understand nature and then also disciplines that will help us translate these understanding in a way that we can communicate it and then also use what we learn to improve our own quality of life. I mean business in reality what it is. So it is science to help us understand how nature is, it is math to help us translate this understanding in a way we can communicate it, then engineering that helps us create products and services and then technologies, the collection of all of these things that we make to improve our quality of life. It's a manmade collection. All right? So we try to use that to understand life and life is more than just those disciplines. So by definition, STEM as we apply them to something far more, to understanding something far more complex, they have to be multidisciplinary. For example, I was trying to think what is the difference between science, math and engineering in a very simplistic way? And I will say, science tells us that tomorrow at this time we'll have daylight, math tells us that most probably it's going to rain and engineering is telling us how to make an umbrella and cover ourselves. I mean that the fundamental difference and I was thinking, we need really to present it in that way to our children when they learn. I understand of course that within colleges and in general and education after K through 12, we are trying to do the best we can to educate those students who come with an interest and a skill. But we all have come to agree that this is kind of late in the process. And that is why all of us are focusing into earlier grades. In fact, one committee where I was, couple of committees by the academy, one was talking about engineering, education and K through 12 and the other talked about science. It was obvious that the work needs to start very early and as a matter of fact, the work has started before even kids go to school. And some aspects of course or many aspects of the STEM fields need require a lot of growth to be able to understand them and utilize them but there are many ways to teach those fields and specifically I would say engineering without knowing anything about math or without knowing anything about science or at least the math and science we learn later. So for example exposure to engineering and of course then the opportunity to become curious can start very early. In fact curiosity is something we are born with and we always will, that's how the brain learn. So utilizing that very early to learn how to do things that are fun is the basis of learning those disciplines. For example I don't know how many of you have made kites when you were very young. Lots of you. I don't know how many of our children make them but for me it was always something I used to make with my dad throughout the year and we would make them from very simple materials. We would buy just a little bit of paper, colored paper mostly because I like the colors and then we would have two sticks and then a little bit of string and we would balance the whole thing. I mean you don't, you can do it, it's fun, you play with it but in the process you learn a lot of things. This is engineering and you can do it when you are four, five, six and you can do it later and you can do it a lot more and much more sophisticated and eventually you could become an aerospace engineer if you stick with it. But I was thinking that's how it is and we forget that we can teach engineering very early. It can be very difficult to comprehend of course, later it does require a lot of math and a lot of science to go with it but it can also be taught very early and it can become fun. And I think that's what we forget in the process and that's why we see so many kids as you saw in this pie graph that we saw earlier, that there is a very, there are two very interesting groups there. One that has no skills and no interest in STEM and that's the largest. The other than has no skills but interest in STEM. These kids have no chance. And so the sum of the two show us how many kids will never do anything serious in STEM. And it's so easy to change that by focusing on how to get those kids early involved and that does not require a lot of money. I think one of your questions is how can we really do this early in a financially constrained environment? Well the most fun I would say engineer problems are the ones that require the least amount of money and that's how engineering should be taught at school very early. This is how science should be taught. I mean science you can go, you can just walk outside and learn science if you have the right teacher to help you learn it. And that's where it gets me to the next. I think the biggest opportunity here is to help out teachers learn how to make science, math, engineering and technology fun very early and then the rest is going to happen. Lonner: Appreciate that. You know, I think what it was like to find comments that are optimistic and positive and whenever somebody says something's easy, I want to latch on to that and explore further because that's what I want to find as well. You know, we talked about the budget cuts and we talked about what are seemingly attractable issues. It could be very daunting. And so I'd be curious if you could expand a little bit what you think the quick wins are, whether it's schools, educators, universities, can get the most bang for the buck given the realities that we're facing. Katehi: So personal opinion obviously right? Because there are a lot of things that need to be done in parallel but I would say if I were to focus on one thing early would be in providing opportunities for teachers to learn in grade school, the early years, how to teach science and math and do that through engineering, through practice. That will be number one. It doesn't matter how much money you throw into the system if you have teachers who cannot do this, is not gonna work. It's the teachers who make things fun and it's the teachers who make things sound complicated and boring, and I would start there first. And if I had any money, I would put it there first. And there are many, now so where can we, our universities of course can help in our training programs and they don't have to be throughout the year, they can be in the summer, and they don't have to be the traditional online programs, they can be a combination. You can have teachers who can work in universities. For example, part time in the summer as part of research groups because that's when you learn how to take a very complex problem and break it down into simpler tasks and then how to communicate something complex in a simple way. And that's what I would do really. When I went to school, I have to say a lot of times we're looking at various systems, educational systems around the world and I was, in fact, I grew up in Greece so the system I went through, it was then, not anymore but then it was very different from the one we have here. There were no electives, there were no options. I mean it was one system. We had math every year from first grade until we graduated. We had science every year. I mean it was a whole list of courses. And in that system, you had to learn specific things. However, when you look at how we have things today, we pay a lot of attention and we value a lot the ability of the students to choose and their families, and that is important. The moment, however, we allow students and families to choose, either it's school or whether it's a curriculum, then we need to provide enough information to make things fun for them to choose the right thing. So for teachers for example, I would say coming back to these that I would provide them a lot of opportunities to learn how to do this and then the rest will happen. Lonner: Thank you. I think we're gonna go to some questions in the audience. One more question I think just open it to the panel generally, so there's a fair amount of data that indicates that girls are losing interest in STEM by the time they get to eighth grade and obviously the dropout rates among Hispanic and African-American students is extraordinarily and alarming high. When you look at where the job growth is and the opportunity for a successful career, what do you think at the university level or for a business perspective can be done to attract more women and minorities into the STEM field, to get them more interested in exploring the STEM disciplines at the university level? Tripette: I think we said first part of the course has already been said. We say it again, teachers, teacher training, getting those teachers to understand the value and excite those students. I think it was also said earlier looking at how we close the digital divide, what can we do to provide technological access to underserved communities and to woman. I think also it's changing the perception of who are the people that should be doing these types of jobs and performing in these fields. And I'll tell a very personal story right now. I went to school, high school, here in Davis and I got a D in geometry and another guy who looked a little different than me in class also got a D in geometry. The teacher told me I need to go find another career because obviously I'm not gonna be good in science and engineering and incidentally I'll say, I always said in high school I was gonna develop a car, in elementary and high school, I was gonna make a car that ran on two double AA batteries. So this teacher knew science and engineering was something that was very passionate to me and that was the response I got. The other guy that looked a little different than me was told, you'll get it, you just need to get a little more help and you'll be able to do this just fine. As a side to that story, my last semester at Morehouse when I was getting that comp sci degree, I was leading my student, tutoring my student peer group and also tutoring people in abstract algebra which is one of the hardest math courses out there which I got an A in. So thank you. But I tell that story to reiterate and give concrete example to just how easy it could be to deter somebody with just one simple story and so many of those things go on in our education system still today that we need to work to dispel. Gotfried: So I think one of the things that I keep looking for is role models and heroes in STEM. So I think as a society, we have an awful lot of heroes in the arts and sports and you know, and some other things but I keep looking for where are the scientists and where, you know, who we can, you know who can come around and inspire students and work with them, you know, in all of those. I remember this, this is a personal story but I was listening to a radio show, sort of you know, interviews and this was a British show and I was over in the UK. And they were interviewing a woman who was a scientist. The day before they had interviewed a rock star, you know and she you know, she had been in the Amazon and was working on climate control and studying climate and so on. And I was so impressed that a scientist had been selected for you know, for a radio show about you know, desert island disc or something like that. And so I think having more role models in the STEM field would really help and whether it's you know, it doesn't necessarily have to be someone famous but someone who is fun to work with who can communicate well because I mentioned that is really a function of engineering and important aspect, not just the basic thing. So I'd really love to see a lot more, as I said, role models and heroes in the STEM field. Quinlivan: I echo what the chancellor had talked about before in terms of teacher preparation and also all the areas of early intervention. I think it is all of our jobs to look at all the intervention points and see what we can do to move people along. One of the things we have to keep in mind is if you're Latino for example, you're more likely to touch and you go to post secondary, you're more likely to touch the community college system first. So we need to figure out how to transition students. If we can captivate them, even if they're earning a one year certificate or n AAS can then we can parlay that interest to stack their credentials so that they can easily transition to the four year system to pursue STEM. So all of us have to figure out how these things are articulate and not make it cumbersome for students to move through and this is one of the, I know the efforts here at this conference. So I'm delighted with that focus. Katehi: So just as a comment at the academy of engineering sometime ago did a study to understand specifically why women do not choose STEM as a career path? And then did a survey that involved many thousands of middle school girls and also many smaller numbers but in the thousands of high school girls. What really came out which was surprising among other things of course but number one in their influence. Those girls that have the potential and the capability, number one in their influence was their mothers, and number two was the counselors or the teachers and then number three were the idols and so forth and so on. So I was thinking if we were to ask all mothers to tell their daughters to take STEM, we would change the numbers substantially, really. Gotfried: So Linda my mother was a math teacher and at the dinner table, we often discussed how she was going to teach certain subjects the next day in class. She was my hero, yes. Lonner: Any questions out there? I see a few number of hands. You have a microphone, alright. Jim Vanides: So Jim Vanides here from HP's Office of Global Social Innovation. I'm curious, I love the conversation about woman interest in STEM and the lack of it in the US. I have a colleague in Puerto Rico who reports that over half the majors of computer science are women and if you look also the trends in India, they don't seem to have any trouble either. So I'm wondering if you could reflect a little bit about why there would be a difference in different geographies and maybe what we can do and maybe it goes back to the whole mom thing, I don't know but... Katehi: Well I would say it's a matter of culture obviously all right, and it starts very early. One of the problems that we have here I believe in the US is how STEM field specifically for women are projected and I'll just give you some very simple examples out of personal experience because it really speaks a lot about what we really have to face out there. My daughter was always very, we have two children, a son and a daughter and she was the best one in math. And she would always come home and complain that she does not understand math even if she was always acing every single class. And we had a very hard time understanding why she felt pressured to say publicly that she does not understand math. That was one thing. The other thing is that she kept asking me whether I had a pocket protector. You know those things that the old days, we don't have them anymore. It was an amazing story and she was very young and the last thing I wanted to say which I'm not gonna forget also, I used to ask the kids to tell me what they wanted to become when they grow older. You know it was just an exercise, fun sometimes when I was driving and they were at the back. Just to see how they were thinking about professions because I thought it was always very critical from very early age to think about what you will do forward. And I remember my son said, well, I wanna become a doctor, and our daughter, who was much younger, like three or four years old, she said, I will become a doctor too. And he said, No, you can only become a nurse, and I was so upset. I mean, because in our family, we've never had that kind of discussion but that's what the kids were picking up from school and this is exactly what we have to fight against. So that is culture of what we consider to be acceptable for men or women for white men or underrepresented men or for all kinds of whatever groups we identify out there and we think that those groups are appropriate only for very specific things. That's what we have to fight. Why now in other countries that it doesn't happen? Because there, there are very specific professions that are very high up in the minds of people. So in those other countries, mothers do feel that it's better for the daughters to be scientists than do fashion design. However in this country, I don't think that happens, I think it's the opposite and that's the problem. That cultural thing and however we have developed out perception and biases for or against specific professions for or other for specific groups of people. That is in fact one thing that works against. Lonner: And those biases not only affect them as individuals and as communities but affects us from a job market as well. Katehi: Truly. Quinlivan: Oh, sorry. Tripette: I was gonna build on to that point that Chancellor Katehi was making, which, looking at it from a more macro issue of the nation versus women versus men, and I think she's spot on there. When you look at other countries outside the US, education, science and definitely technology are seen as a means of bettering yourself and moving yourself up. So they are starving, thriving for anything they can get, computer, internet, science, all of these fields. They are starving and thriving on these because they see it as a means to move up. Here in the US, we take a lot of that for granted. We kind of went through that I think during the Sputnik era when we have the one scientific threat, you know it was the threat of the Russians, it was the threat that someone was gonna beat us to the moon and that seemed to galvanize us all on one key issue. And at that point, we kind of seemed to appreciate, respect and really drive down that goal of science and engineering and understanding the value of them. We've now lost that. Other countries have obviously grasped on to that and that's why I think we are continually falling behind on that area. Quinlivan: Yeah I used to mention a factoid to scare fellow corporations into getting engaged with education and that factoid is the fact that the baby boomers are the most educated, they're the most educated generation and upon the exit of the boomers in the next five to ten years from the workforce, the ensuing generation actually had lower educational attainment. This is probably the first time in our country's history. So we've got a lot of work to do to replace that and I wonder if there's a way structurally to engage baby boomers who are exiting but don't want to work full time to come back into the classroom to teach them, to teach career technical education as professionals in the classroom because we're gonna need that supplemental skill sets to build our teaching base. Lonner: Another question. Thank you. Hilary: Thank you. Hilary [IB] from Apple and I am so glad that each one of you mentioned something very important about how you get kids engaged was relevancy and context. And so I just want to put out there for a way that we've seen higher-ed universities in other states get engaged with K-12 education. I'll use one example out of Arizona, Arizona State University does a podcast. Very low cost, very low cost to the university, one professor does this, he calls himself Dr. Biology. The twist on the podcast, it's called Ask a Biologist. He brings in top-notch biologists, the twist is they're interviewed by fourth-graders and the fourth-graders get to get into this interview by submitting questions. So he picks out the best questions. He says, We're gonna have a scientist who knows about clays that have magical properties, what would you ask the scientist who knows all about dirt? And they submit three questions and that's how he picked them. And the more that this happens and if you go and listen into theses podcasts and I'm a scientist by training, these are the best interviews with these scientists I have ever heard because they are the most engaged they ever have been because they're being asked by fourth-graders about their work. And they open up in a way that they never do at a conference. Again, very low cost to Arizona State University to put this on, gives each podcast as a learning object for a teacher to use and put into the classroom. Most of their kids already have some sort of music device to play a podcast on. They know how to get this on. So it's a very low cost entry. I just encourage all the universities to think about ways to do this that, we always think about the barrier to entry and we have to get tech everywhere. Well there's a lot of low-tech ways to get this kind of information and this kind of engagement in getting people interested in this and I agree with you, role models, the Myth Busters are some of the best scientific role models out there on TV, Dr. Brian Cox who's from CERN, who's a world-class physicist, he has a BBC show called The Wonders and he makes science fun. There are lot of them out there and we just have to encourage our students to look at those. So I'm glad that all of you, each of you brought up separately context and relevancy because that's the only way you're gonna keep the kids interested. You might get them at the beginning but to keep them interested, you have to keep it relevant. Thanks. Lonner: Thank you. So I'm gonna transform that really insightful comment into a final question because I think we're running short on time. So you mentioned relevance and we talked earlier about the importance of making education fun, when you think about the importance of making education both relevant, industry standpoint from a business standpoint and in terms of culture relevant to speak to issues, you know, of attracting underrepresented populations. How do you make these disciplines more relevant to a broader audience of proficient young people? And that's for any of you. Tripette: I went first last time, I'll hold for one of you guys. Katehi: I can say this, about the need to also reconsider out curricula. I would have to say that I have been pretty critical about engineering curricular across the board. I think they are outdated to some degree. They have been developed 30 years ago and they were really based on the need at the time to teach kids a lot of content without necessarily focusing on relevant problems and without focusing on developing the skills. So for example you look at college traditional engineering curriculum and design is only a small part of it. Usually happens towards the end, you lose a lot of kids very early because they don't see why they have so many classes of algebra and differential equations and everything before they even see a problem that they can tack themselves and address. And I think it's a great opportunity for us to reconsider what we're trying to do. There was a very big effort by the academy to create a series of reports and where we call the engineer of 2020, so I'm addressing of course the part of the STEM, but not much really progress has happened. I mean at least maybe I have very high expectations about what could be done. I think some things have happened but not as much as we could have put in place to be able to create engineers who know how to solve what is relevant to industry. And I would say not just to industry, to society. You have a lot of kids who graduate very successfully with very high GPAs and so forth, you ask them to consider a true problem and they have a great deal of difficulty in trying to understand how to approach it. And that is one thing we can do but it does require discipline in that regard. It's a big changing curricula as you all know just in K through 12 in any place, it's a very hard thing to do. Does require commitment, it's very expensive as well but something we really need to do. Gotfried: Yes so, actually one of the things, one of my roles is university relations and one of the things I try to do is to get some problems that actually are problems for us, they don't have direct, really obvious solutions. We sometimes come up with them in some of the workshops that we have that we call innovation challenges and people come up with sort of difficult problems and some of those problems we actually take to universities and offer them up for capstone projects and some of our engineers work with a group of students to work with them to come up with solutions to those difficult problems. So we can certainly address that and do that for different grade levels as well. Lonner: Well I think that's gonna have to be the final word because they're giving us the hook. You wanted the final, the final word is yours. You take it. Tripette: I'll build on this very quickly to say one of the other things to do is dispel the perception that science is not cool and uplift those students that are out there doing really cool things. The Google kids that were at the White House every day. Intel brings about 1,600 people from around the world every year in the Intel international Science and Engineering Fair. Look for those showcases to dispel those myths and help students understand the excitement and the value of science and engineering. Lonner: That's a great, strong not to end at. I hope that the conversation helped inspire some new ideas that will fill the thermometer and push it towards the top. I want to, please join me in thanking our panelists for taking the time.