drfoland

Oh man, this takes me back! We used to do a really fun little outreach activity for elementary school students where we would have them build a felt "cell" model alongside a "city" model. We would have them put up each organelle at the same time as they would place a part of the city - so "town hall" and "nucleus" would go up at the same time, etc.

Anyway, I remember the exact month that that meme starting becoming a thing. All of a sudden, every single kid knew exactly what to put on the board alongside the "power plant" - it was kind of surreal.

Hi Snehith! Two things, honestly:

1. In a university environment done right, students are exposed to all kind of new concepts, ideas, and causes. It is when a lot of us learn about professional responsibility and initiatives that are important to the world as a whole. Unfortunately, a lot of our personality (obviously not all of it, but a good bit) is already established at that point. We want our future technical professionals to be good citizens of the scientific community, but most of the time they don't get exposed to what that means until they're already adults. I felt strongly that, with the power of the Internet, we could be exposing students to those kinds of ideas at a much earlier age. That's one of the reasons I emphasize our group as a community so frequently, and encourage our high school students to take on projects that give back - be it for the benefit of education, the environment, those less fortunate, etc.
2. In a university environment done wrong, students have been so conditioned to worry about grades and rankings that the relationship between students and professors becomes borderline adversarial. My perspective on this was likely further skewed by the fact that, in biomedical engineering, a large percentage of students are pre-med students who have been told that having an engineering degree will help them get into a good med school. Coming in with that kind of attitude leads to way too many students who don't have a love for engineering, learning, or even the field they are going into. Sucks the fun out of it for everyone, you know?

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What I love about what I'm doing now is that all of my students are here because they want to be. This is something I love to do (both teaching and engineering), and it's great to be surrounded by people who love it too.

It is one of the things that keeps me up at night, and probably one of the biggest motivating factors I had in making the transition I made.

In another response, I wrote:

In a university environment done right, students are exposed to all kind of new concepts, ideas, and causes. It is when a lot of us learn about professional responsibility and initiatives that are important to the world as a whole. Unfortunately, a lot of our personality (obviously not all of it, but a good bit) is already established at that point. We want our future technical professionals to be good citizens of the scientific community, but most of the time they don't get exposed to what that means until they're already adults. I felt strongly that, with the power of the Internet, we could be exposing students to those kinds of ideas at a much earlier age...

Kids are are born with a natural curiosity (Piaget) and without hate or bigotry in their hearts (I don't know, Fred Rogers, maybe?). All the bad stuff, they learn from influences around them. I worry about the future of kids who are growing up in the kinds of households that you described. Obviously it's not their fault, but I worry that by the time they get to university age and have a chance to get out in the "real world", those crazy beliefs they grew up with will be too deeply ingrained for them to escape from.

If I found out some day that a kid from a crazy anti-vaxx / flat earth / etc. household discovered our program early on and it helped them get through things, that would probably be the highlight of my career.

I think there's a healthy balance between "fun" and "serious", and it changes depending on the age of the students. With elementary-age kids, it's a win if they're having fun and walk away with a bit more knowledge than they went in with, that's for sure.

For older students (esp. high school), it is important that the fun be balanced with the reality that "real" science and engineering are hard. Having that perspective from my time at the university is something I am really grateful for. A lot of times, educators get so focused on trying to make science seem "fun" that kids end up going off to college never expecting a challenge, and end up very disillusioned and frustrated as a result when things get tough.

For me, I like to bring "fun" into it in two main areas: One is taking a serious look at silly things - an example of this is our current project of engineering a better water bottle rocket launcher. It's a goofy, fun, relateable toy at the end of the day, but we're having serious discussions about 3D printing tolerances, durability, and documentation around it.

The second thing is to just maintain a good "balance" to the educational environment. Science and engineering get hard, and you would never expect (or at least shouldn't expect) grad students to have laser-focus on their projects for 8+ hours at a time - so why should we expect that of younger students? It's a lot easier to do this in an informal education environment, granted, but taking time to talk to the students about things other than curriculum keeps things from getting oppressive.

I just realized that you asked for unintended effects, so I thought I would answer again...

The most unintended effect I have ever experienced was the outcomes of the Summer Biomedical (SBEE) program. We ask Likert scale questions on both an entry and exit survey to help us assess affective domain criteria; questions such as "How interested are you in pursuing biomedical engineering as a future career" (scale of 1-7). That particular question had a surprising (to me) result.

What we found was that, on the entry survey, the median was typically very neutral - around a 3.5 / 7. On the exit survey, we found that the median was... almost exactly the same. However, looking into it further, what we found was that the distribution had changed dramatically! Whereas the entry survey results tend to have a very low standard deviation, with almost all of the students' responses clustered around the middle, the exit survey results were almost always bimodal in nature, with almost as many students sure that they now wanted to pursue BMEN as a future career as students who had become sure that they did not.

I see that as an absolute win - to me it indicates an incoming student body who are unsure what they want to do in the future, and an outgoing student body who are just a bit more sure of themselves. At the end of the day, biomedical engineering isn't for everyone, and it is just as good for students to recognize that as it is for them to find out that they love it.

I have since followed up with many of the students who fell onto the low end of that Likert scale, and have heard from many of them that, while they didn't like the field as a whole, the camp helped them realize the elements that they did like - most recently, I talked to a college sophomore who attended SBEE 2015 and didn't enjoy the electrical or mechanical engineering portions, but loved the programming aspects - he is now a CS major.