Local Science Rodeo, part 2
education edition
It has been a good month, not just for science events here in the Triad but for science education events. Here’s a little sample from my personal experience over the past few weeks.
Wingspan
On the 9th our local chapter of Audubon hosted a zoom session with Elizabeth Hargrave, the designer of one of the most popular board games of the pandemic, which has sold over a million hard copies worldwide, and is now a smartphone app. I’ve only played Wingspan once, but clearly a lot of people really love it. The company compares it to Terraforming Mars, which I have played multiple times and always enjoy. I describe my first experience with that second game in the piece below.
Ms. Hargrave described some of her design process, which included scraping online databases for scientifically accurate bird facts she could warp responsibly into game stats on the individual bird cards. Also a lot of playtesting.
She has gone on to design other games, and I found it interesting that she openly acknowledged that probably none of them will ever be the runaway hit that Wingspan has been. That perfect storm of lockdown leisure time and online buzz may never happen again (also supply-chain disruptions that created an artificial sense of scarcity).
I totally know how that feels, at a much lower and less profitable level. I was excited when last week’s short story broke 150 views, which is nowhere near the 4.8 million views that my online collaboration with Anton Bogaty for TED-Ed has collected over the years. And presumably never will be.
Which reminds me — I really need to update my profile on TED-Ed to drive some traffic to this site. I must be one of the worst marketers ever . . .
Innovation in Education
Then last Tuesday afternoon, the 14th, I wandered over to the School of Education building, which has a lavishly re-designed website with a lot of PR pieces on their partnerships and accomplishments, but no faculty directory that I could find. I may not be the worst marketer after all.
They were hosting an “innovation summit,” which basically meant a panel discussion between some local / regional entrepreneurs with Q&A from SoE faculty. I kept quiet and slipped out early because I had to teach my last night class of the semester. There were some really interesting bits, though.
Brandon Busteed has his own newsletter but apparently works for Kaplan, the test-prep company that has grown into a worldwide consulting octopus. He pointed out that despite the current fashion for cutting liberal arts programs, what employers tell him they want are people who are “broadly educated, with a specialized skill set.” The two are not zero-sum options.
Lifelong learning has been a buzzy phrase for a long time, but despite the fact that 63% of working adults in the US engage in some kind of career-based education, we’re still a long way from the system he wants where “there’s no difference between work and learning.”
Hunter Moore of Plasma Games in Raleigh lamented how long it’s taking his own company to hire engineers, while China and India are each pumping them out at six times the rate of the US. These kinds of scare tactics go back to Sputnik and the Cold War, when we were worried the Russians were winning the space race. This report from Duke researchers, however, adds some nuance to the discussion.
In China, the word “engineer” does not translate well into different dialects and has no standard definition. We were told that reports sent to the MoE from Chinese provinces did not count degrees in a consistent way. A motor mechanic or a technician could be considered an engineer, for example. Also, the numbers included all degrees related to information technology and to specialized fields such as shipbuilding. It seems that any bachelor’s degree with “engineering” in its title was included in the ministry’s statistics, regardless of the degree’s field or associated academic rigor. Ministry reports also included “short-cycle” degrees typically completed in two or three years, making them equivalent to associate degrees in the United States. Nearly half of China’s reported degrees fell into this category.
Moore also said that industry needs chemists and physicists, not biologists. My personal bias is that fixing the damage that profit-driven industry has done to the planetary ecosystems is going to require more biologists, not fewer. I’d be happy to try and follow up with any of these panelist people if you, the anonymous reader, would like to know more.
F.U.T.U.R.E.S.
There’s always gotta be an acronym with STEM types. I don’t remember what this one stands for, except that the R was for Rural (not Randall!!!), and as far as I can tell it isn’t spelled out on their website. It’s an outreach program funded by pharmaceutical company Glaxo SmithKline, focused on community colleges. The general and slightly ironic idea is to use humanities techniques (storytelling) to increase the diversity of the technical workforce. The broader societal furor over identity politics has extended into education, with an emphasis on developing a STEM identity. The FUTURES take on this is to train people to leverage their life stories as inspirational lessons in how to persevere in a scientific career.
I did the FUTURES trainings online during the pandemic in 2021. I developed a performance piece around the insect collection I had to do for Biology II in high school. Haven’t ever gotten around to posting it here (and won’t today, because this piece is already a little long), but here is a piece of similar flavor that I did independently a few years earlier.
This past Saturday I went to a FUTURES storytelling workshop at Mitchell Community College in Statesville, attended by students and faculty from a number of the local community colleges. North Carolina has 58 of them.
I’m at a four-year school now, but you know me. I’m always poking my big nose where it doesn’t belong.
It was a good little workshop. Tandeka Boko from Forsyth Tech in Winston-Salem led a session where we chose identities from a pile of laminated cards. Each of us, as ourselves, had to explain what we do to the role-player. I had a conversation about mouth bacteria with Efrain Rivera-Serrano, who was playing a fifth grade science fair winner. His pretend project was about comparing brands of mouthwash by smelling people’s breath, and I told him about how sharks can replace their teeth.
(Coincidentally, my next door neighbor just completed a science fair project with her kid, who grew bacteria from swabs of human skin washed with different methods).
When it was my turn to be the audience, I played a retired politician whose main concerns were about budgeting, so we talked about how Efrain trains his students in time management and study skills. It was a good technique, and I’m totally going to steal it for my freshman seminar next fall (which is up to 17 students at last count!). It might seem ironic in a way that as a tabletop RPG enthusiast I had never tried something like that, but my one attempt at teaching a high school chemistry class as Fox Mulder from the X-Files went so badly that I never tried again. It seems the key is to let the students do the role-playing. Duh.
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