Fighting the US STEM Crisis With All-Day Robotics, Endoscopy, and Monster-Making

“The school day has been the same since the Roosevelt era—the Teddy Roosevelt era,” said Michael Zigman, founder of i2 Learning. “Silos of classes, unrelated to each other? Today’s school day comes from an era where everything was an assembly-line. Today, the world is collaborative and interdisciplinary, demanding thought, not just absorption of fact. The school day needs to be changed.”

So, he told Bioscience Technology: “We are changing it.”

Zigman started small. He and friend Ethan Berman, a technology entrepreneur formerly with JP Morgan, launched a highly innovative, hands-on STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) summer program in 2013 for middle schoolers in two empty schools. The initial reason was simply that Berman’s kids needed something to do, and “liked science over soccer.” The duo chose Boston’s Roxbury Latin (RL) because Berman was on the RL board and there was space there. They added a second school—Chapin Academy in New York—because Berman’s daughter went there.

Then they contacted people they knew at area colleges and museums, from MIT and the Boston Museum of Science to the New York Hall of Science, to design innovative courses that might give kids real-life-like science experience—that beat soccer. Together, they and their enthusiastic new partners—from some of the most advanced science institutes in the world—easily whipped up 30 novel classes.

As soon as that summer of two, four-to-six-week science camps was over, the two felt they had something compelling on their hands. They had attracted over 350 kids, 25 percent of whose tuition was paid for by scholarships, and most of whom had reacted to science more as fans than as students.

The i2 crew decided to expand into the school day—immediately.

“No programs have focused on absolutely immersing middle-school kids in science during the school day before,” explained Zigman, who had been a technology investment banker for 17 years, and is a New York Academy of Sciences (NYAS) board member. There are a lot of science camps for high schoolers. There are Citizen Schools for under-privileged kids after school. But there was nothing highly immersive during the school day, “nothing rigorous,” for kids in the extremely formative grades of four through eight, he said.

From CSI to surgical techniques to interactive monsters

So they immediately expanded to a week during the 2013-2014 school year at the above two schools, and one public school in Port Chester, NY. Seeing immediate success there, they attracted more collaborators, including Harvard University, Bose, and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. Having created more than 65 courses, they brought their novel intensive science program into the 2014-2015 school year, to 23 schools across the country, from New York to Boston, Connecticut to California.

The program ran a unique full week of five science-only school days. All the teachers in middle-school grades were trained and enlisted in many cases. “Non-science teachers too,” Zigman told Bioscience Technology. The program generated another unexpected benefit: “We got some non-science teachers very interested in science.”

The courses were, and are, far from standard science fare. One course teaches children how to engineer prosthetics. Another teaches them robotics. Another teaches them indoor, LED-lit, stacked farming. Another is a CSI (crime scene investigation) course, “taught by real FBI guys. Everybody loved that one—including the FBI guys.” Another course teaches surgical techniques, from suturing to endoscopies.

A personal favorite of Zigman’s is a course in which children learn how to build “interactive stuffed monsters using sensors and conductive thread,” he said. “The thread has a current running through it so that you can create monsters that speak or sing when you squeeze them.” As that course makes toys “come alive,” as its tagline suggests, it is a favorite among Zigman’s smaller followers, as well.

Stellar report cards from colleagues—and kids

Last month, the Columbia University Teacher’s College wrote a review of a program that i2 ran in the Port Chester school. “The level of student engagement was high across the observed classrooms,” read the report. “Students would frequently lean forward, exclaim with excitement, and generally showed on-task behavior. The evaluator noted that students would ‘groan’ when they had to go to other classes (electives), lunch, or when school ended for the day. Some teachers indicated that the project-based work was engaging for students that normally were not so engaged.”

The report also noted students in i2 Learning “participated in engaging and authentic [educational development] projects. The student level of on-task behavior and enthusiasm was extremely high. Students had unique opportunities to collaborate, innovate, and problem-solve throughout their experience in the four- day i2 Learning curriculum.”

Continued the report: “Evaluators consistently noted that students were deeply engaged in the design process.”

One teacher told the reviewers: “All students rose to the challenge—just incredible!”

Spreading immersion?

Schools have used “language immersion” for years to better teach children second languages. Language immersion in the past took the form of semesters abroad. More recently, it has manifested in the teaching of non-language courses in second languages in select US schools. Such “dual language” schools have been increasing. The New York Times (NYT) recently reported that, in New York City, there were 39 new or expanded dual-language programs this fall alone, for a total of 180 programs that offer immersive language training in Arabic, Chinese, French, Haitian-Creole, Hebrew, Korean, Polish, Russian and Spanish.

In Utah, the NYT reported, nine percent of the state’s public elementary students were participants in dual-language programs. In Portland, Oregon, one in five kindergartners and 10 percent of all students are enrolled in such programs. Delaware and North Carolina are also pursuing the approach.

Arguments for immersive dual-language programs range from the fact that the global economy demands bi-lingualism, to the fact that dual-lingualism may sharpen cognition and stave off dementia in later life.

“Science immersion” is far less common. But Zigman is far from the only person arguing that, one way or another, more intensive science education may be even more important—and soon.

For instance, the NYAS reports that 75 percent of jobs will require some kind of science training by 2018. The Best Schools, looking at Department of Labor stats, found that at least 17 of the top 25 paying jobs in the US already involve extensive science training.

Now that it costs less than $1,000 to sequence the human genome, Big Data jobs may increase so fast there will soon be a shortage of between 140,000 to 190,000 people with the proper analytical skills to translate it—let alone a shortage of 1.5 million managers and analysts who use it for key decisions, says Forbes.

And then there is the simple fact that science inspires.

“One reason we went immediately from a camp—which we still do—to the school-year day: in the summer you only get the kids who raise their hands,” Zigman said. “In the winter, you get them all, including the kids who don’t give a hoot about science. You can open their eyes, get subject matter in front of them they do not normally see, change their lives.”

More importantly, he said, when you do that immersively, “so that science is all that they are doing, they can better acquire scientists’ ability to dare to fail, leave fear of failure at the door, lose themselves in subject matter. That is everything, but you can’t it get in a 40 minute period, where you are just getting into things when the bell rings.”

The future
Zigman’s team is working with a few schools on his next goal: launching an even more immersive program that would devote half the school day to science for an unheard-of one-to-two months.

In 2015-2016, 13 of 15 of i2’s school-year programs are being held in public schools. The team is in 30 to 40 schools total for week-long school-day programs so far.

They are in some 40 schools in the summers, when they are also able to lure in professional scientists in to give one-off talks.

“A full 75 percent of all jobs may not require science training by as early as 2018,” Zigman concluded. “But we are moving that way fast. There is no turning back from that.”

Other immersive science programs for kids include: W.M. Keck Science Department’s week-long summer programs for college-bound high school students (projects include the analysis and of the genome and proteome of a bacteria); a high school girls’ summer immersion computer program sponsored by CUNY and Girls Who Code; SUNY Oswego’s summer youth programs for high school students; Deep River Science Academy’s six week science program for high school students; and Jump Start, a one-week, University of Maryland science program for 50 top high schoolers.