Leslieanne John wanted to avoid the low-performing, often dangerous high schools in the East Flatbush section of Brooklyn, N.Y., where she lived. But when she didn’t get accepted into any of the other schools she applied to as an eighth-grader in 2011, she decided to take a chance on a new school. Called Pathways in Technology Early College High School, or P-Tech for short, the school had opened in a nearby neighborhood the year before.
John found the vocational school challenging and her fellow students smart and competitive. Her father encouraged her but warned that as a young black woman hoping to enter the technology world, she had to work four times as hard as anyone else. He’d had to quit college with only a few credits to go when she was born, but he knew his daughter could make it.
John did. Besides receiving her high school diploma, graduating from P-Tech also earned her an associate’s degree in computer systems technology from the New York City College of Technology.
“Seeing my dad’s face when the confetti dropped, that was enough for me,” she says, recalling her graduation last June. Now 20, John works in organizational development at IBM and is studying for her bachelor’s degree part-time. A lot of her middle school friends already have children; a few are incarcerated.
P-Tech’s unique model brings together high schools, community colleges and corporate employers who collaborate on the curriculum. Fusing classroom instruction with workplace experience, the program also offers internships and mentoring. Meant to be completed in six years or less, P-Tech was designed by IBM, where nearly all graduates who do not go on to four-year colleges are first in line for any open jobs. The end goal: to provide kids from low-income communities a direct route to the middle class.
So far, P-Tech in Brooklyn has graduated 81 students; 14 have accepted jobs from IBM, and almost all of them are pursuing their bachelor’s degrees while working. Nationally, those with only a high school education earn an average of $30,500 per year. For P-Tech graduates working at IBM, that number jumps to around $50,000, according to Stan Litow, president emeritus of the IBM Foundation and the founder of the P-Tech model.
IBM built the program to be easily replicated by school districts in other states and around the world. The company offers online support and curriculum guidance for those interested in developing the public-private partnerships necessary to the model’s success. There are now more than 80 P-Tech schools in six states as well as in Australia and Morocco, with corporate partners in fields spanning healthcare, manufacturing and agriculture.
Rashid Ferrod Davis, P-Tech’s founding principal, rushes through the well-maintained hallways in a blue tracksuit, pausing only to pick up dropped paper towels on the floor. He says the hardest part of his job is going home each day, as there are many afterschool activities to attend, not to mention an education model to perfect.
He explains that a longer school day, with some teachers working an early shift and others a late shift, provides more time for freshmen to focus on English, math, and career readiness in longer blocks. It’s a cohesive curriculum — for example, a math class might include elements of writing and teach presentation and business skills.
A recent report by the College Board noted that P-Tech in Brooklyn had a completion rate four times higher than the national average for associate-degree students. More than 80 percent of its alumni are currently working toward their bachelor’s degree, compared to 55 percent of New York City students who graduate from traditional high schools. That’s good news, considering that by 2024 an estimated 16 million new jobs will be created that require at least a two-year degree.
John, who finished the six-year program in just four-and-a-half years, says P-Tech introduced her to a side of herself she didn’t know she had. “The last thing on my mind was how hard I needed to work,” she says now. “But being around peers that were also very competitive and very intelligent sort of pushed me and the rest of us to get everything done as quickly and as best as we could.”
Tag: STEM learning
They’re Learning STEM Skills by Dancing to Destiny’s Child
At the start of the L train in the upper-class Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, there are 10 city-funded Wi-Fi hubs within two blocks. When the train hits Brooklyn, two miles east, there are another six Wi-Fi hubs being installed in the hip East Williamsburg area. But the numbers start to fall as the train dives deeper into Brooklyn, where poverty is rampant. By the time it hits the neighborhoods of East New York and Brownsville, there are none.
Out here, almost a third of homes don’t have internet access — the gateway to a community’s broader participation in STEM industries and the jobs they offer. High schools, meanwhile, are under-equipped with the basic infrastructure needed for internet access and technology education. Music, dance and the arts, in contrast, are well established in the community.
This disconnect — in the midst of a national trend to move funding from the humanities to STEM — is what led Yamilée Toussaint, a mechanical engineering graduate from MIT, to start STEM From Dance, a program for high school girls that merges the local culture of dance and music with a future in learning complex science and technology concepts.
“Students who would be a natural fit for, say, a career as a coder don’t necessarily know that until they are introduced to it,” Toussaint says. “Through dance, we’re attracting them to a different world that they wouldn’t otherwise opt-in themselves.”
Toussaint, a tiny woman with large hair and a soft voice, created the program five years ago. Normally it spans a full semester, but this year she increased the number of girls she can reach with a summer intensive curriculum focused on circuitry.
During the course of one week, participants practice a dance routine that they pair with lessons on building and coding circuits.
“It was hard at first,” says Chantel Harrison, a 17-year-old participant from Crown Heights, Brooklyn. “I didn’t know what it was about, honestly.”
Harrison and a couple dozen other girls are taught to wire battery-powered light circuits. They sew them into their dance costumes to create splashy light effects synced to a song’s beat. For many of them, this is their first introduction to computer science and coding.
And that is a stark reality check. In New York City, where technology often seems boundless — and where there have been huge strides to build up “Silicon Alley,” New York City’s own version of the Bay Area’s Silicon Valley — kids educated in the city’s outer borough’s face significant barriers to a future working in the tech industry.
“If we cannot allow our children to have first-class computer equipment in a first-class city, they’re not going to be prepared to be employed at a first-rate corporation,” Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams tells NationSwell. “We cannot have a digital divide in our borough and in our city.”
Both Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio have pushed for high-speed internet access and STEM course integration into the city’s high school curriculum by 2025. But in Brooklyn, a study published in December 2016 by the Brooklyn Borough President’s office found there is progress to be made: Internet access is subpar (the average rating is 3 out of 5) in the district’s schools; there are only enough tablets and laptops for 7 and 20 percent of the borough’s student population, respectively; and 70 percent of schools don’t have an established computer science curriculum.
“The mayor has a very strong goal, but the question is, are we set up to meet this goal based on current investments in schools?” says Stefan Ringel, a spokesperson for Adams. He adds that reaching the 2025 goal will require more investments in infrastructure upgrades as well as in the curriculum.
“There is a lot of talk around getting these students active in STEM education, but I’d say for our program, if we have 12 girls sign up, maybe one has actually been exposed to coding,” says Toussaint, as she watches a group of six teenagers practice a dance routine to Destiny’s Child’s “Survivor.”
“We’re not trying to make engineers or professional dancers within a week,” says Arielle Snagg, an instructor with STEM From Dance who also has a degree in neuroscience. “But we are hoping to give them an idea on how they can use technology within this art.”
Snagg, originally from Bushwick — another impoverished Brooklyn neighborhood — says she understands the plight of students who live in these parts of New York. Of those who work (and only about half the population does), just 5 percent do so within the tech and science fields. And getting more women into technology can help a labor force that is desperate for diversity, especially when it comes to women of color.
After a week in the camp, Harrison, who will be a senior at Achievement First Brooklyn High School in the fall, says she gained a new appreciation for the integration of dance and science. “And I’ve gotten better in math — I’ve even learned to love it.”
Next spring, Toussaint will see her first group of students graduate from high school. And though she hopes that many of them pursue technology in college, more than anything she wants them to enter any career with confidence.
“The point is to let [these girls] know that they can do anything, and they don’t have to do one thing,” she says. “They just have to open up their minds a bit.”
Can a Plush Toy Robot Get Young Kids Interested in STEM?
How many parents have spent countless hours playing Candy Land or Barbies with their kids?
Chris Harden and Jeremy Scheinberg are two dads from Alabama and Florida who grew tired of their children’s toys. The two felt their children weren’t getting much out of playing mindless games, which is why they decided to create a toy that helps kids get a head start on science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) learning.
In less than a week, the pair will crowdfund a campaign on Kickstarter.com for their answer to more STEM-focused toys. TROBO, which connects to an iPad or iPhone app, is a plush toy robot that tells stories of STEM-focused topics to children ages 2 to 7, the Anniston Star reports.
TROBO features two characters: Curie, named for physicist and chemist Marie Curie and Edison, (a shout out to inventor Thomas Edison), both representing STEM heroes. TROBO plans to release more characters if the Kickstarter campaign is successful.
Harden previously served as a Development Director of EA Sports, overseeing the creation of user interface technologies for games like Madden NFL and NCAA Football. Scheinberg was the COO of media manufacturer Alcorn McBride and has worked extensively on rides and shows for NBC, Universal, Lego and Disney.
“It defines us as individuals, and we want to share that to our children as early as we can,” Harden says, referring to STEM education.
While the entry point at which children should begin STEM education remains a point of contention, some advocates argue the earlier the better. In fact, only 16 percent of American high school seniors are considering a career in the STEM fields and are proficient in math, according to the U.S. Department of Education.
“As a society, we have to celebrate outstanding work by young people in science at least as much as we do Super Bowl winners,” President Barack Obama said earlier this year at the White House Science Fair. “Because superstar biologists and engineers and rocket scientists and robot builders, they don’t always get the attention that they deserve, but they’re what’s going to transform our society.”
Beginning with something as simple as a stuffed robot regaling children with STEM stories sounds like a good place to start.
MORE: Ask the Experts: How Can We Fix Early Childhood Education?
To Help Young Girls, This MIT Student Brings Together Two Unlikely Disciplines
The words “don’t” and “can’t” mean two drastically different things.
Yet, when Kirin Sinha, a senior at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), tutored younger students, she noticed that boys often used one word, while girls used another in the same scenario.
Boys said that they don’t understand fractions, whereas the girls said they can’t.
That subtle discernment combined with Sinha’s love for dance led to an idea that’s rethinking the way in which we approach STEM (that’s science, technology, engineering, and math to the uninitiated) learning among females. About a year and a half ago, the theoretical math and computer science and electrical engineering major founded SHINE, an eight-week-long after-school program for middle school girls combining dance classes with a tailored math curriculum.
Sinha, who began taking tap, ballet, and jazz at age three, realized that her self-confidence and discipline came not from her love of math — but from her years of dance training.
“You’re taught to work really hard and work through the sheer sweat and grit,” Sinha, now also a professional dancer, told the Boston Globe. “That stuck with me through math.”
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Struck by the thought that perhaps it was dancing that built certain skills that were left out of math curriculums, she launched the after-school program in hopes to encourage more young females to be confident and interested in math.
The Boston and Cambridge-area program begins with dance class followed by time spent solving math problems. Sinha also designed the program to convey math through games — using movement and dancing to work out a problem that typically is reasoned in silence in the classroom.
“And when they go upstairs and they have a mental block about — ‘I don’t understand how to solve this equation,’ we can say, ‘Well, think about what you did at the dance studio downstairs,'” Sinha told CBS.
For example, the girls solve algebra problems by assigning dance moves to different parts of an equation or play a game of Simon Says to formulate a geometric shape.
The program, which is slated to expand to a selection of New York public schools next year, has not only encouraged more young females to be comfortable doing math but also to feel confident. Sinha has tested some of her students at the beginning and the end of the program to measure gains and has found up to a 273 percent improvement, CBS reports.
This summer Sinha is working toward expanding the program nationally and plans to attend the University of Cambridge in the fall on a Marshall scholarship, where she hopes to launch an international version.
While she’s aiming to attract more female STEM students, Sinha’s hope is to teach young women that they shouldn’t feel boxed in by a stereotype.
“What we really want to teach these girls is that those boxes that they feel they might be in are completely imaginary,” she added.