Sheffield — Parents with school-aged children are likely to have heard a lot about Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, or STEM. In an effort to make the U.S. competitive with its business rivals such as China, President Obama set about prioritizing the training of STEM teachers and grant programs to encourage students to study and excel in the STEM subjects.
Locally, students at Mount Everett Regional High School now have the opportunity to take one of eight elective classes under the newly named STEM Academy. They might learn about the principles of flight in the drone class, build an underwater robot to test out in the aquaponics tank, train for competitions, or become one of South Berkshire Regional School District’s own IT staff, solving technology problems in a school building that holds nearly 700 students in grades K–12.
Chris Thompson, the STEM Academy’s director, is the school’s technology coordinator. Paul O’Brien, who taught at Mount Everett for 34 years before retiring in 2010, volunteers with the after-school robotics team year-round. He says he is still invested because he loves the kids and they work so well together.
O’Brien started Mount Everett’s Students as Tech Leaders (SATL) class 20 years ago. This used to be known as the AV club, who were the kids you went to for help running the projector. Today, these kids are the school’s help desk or, in Apple-speak, Genius Bar. They troubleshoot wherever they are dispatched. The second tier of SATL is learning about networks, and participants helped upgrade the district’s connections, cutting and crimping network cabling during the summer. In the school year, they still have that opportunity, though it’s harder to open up the ceiling then.
With the name “STEM Academy,” the offerings of which range from 3D engineering and design to an independent-study option, they are simply categorizing what they have always been doing. Said Thompson: “We’re trying to make the next generation of computer programmers, 3D designers and robotic engineers. This, along with our culinary and carpentry programs, is really helping to address many of the vocational and technical education needs of our students.”
Newer STEM Academy additions include programs sponsored by branches of the U.S. military. The Office of Naval Research sponsors the SeaPerch underwater robot program, which offers regular competitions. The Air Force is behind Cyberpatriot, in which students study operating systems for vulnerabilities. Said Thompson, “We look for every opportunity to bring the newest stuff to our kids.”
Thompson graduated from Mount Everett in 1991 and returned to teach multimedia lab courses and computer applications. That transitioned in the early 2000s to the afterschool Lego robotics team, which grew in size and sophistication. In 2008 they brought in metal robots and began competing at the high school level, developing courses as a way to support the team. After-school Lego robotics has segued most recently into “Vex.” Schools purchase the Vex set of components for about $400, O’Brien told me, and its simplicity “evens the playing field a bit” since you can’t enhance Vex robots with expensive shopping trips to the hardware store.
For many years Mount Everett has been the little school that could in regard to the robotics competitions aspect of its STEM work. Enrollment at Mount Everett was at about 400 a decade ago, dipped below 300 in 2016–17, and rebounded a bit last year to just over 300. Yet in 2013, 2014 and 2015, the school’s robotics team, called “Hyperspace,” has competed against teams from much larger suburban schools from towns like Lexington and Lincoln — and won.
Last year Hyperspace beat out 20 other teams to make it to the Southern New England Regional Championship, where they lost a shot at the world championship by just “one cone,” which translated to three points, 75–72.
There were 500 teams in the gym that day. The three team members operating any given two-minute challenge must focus intently on a 12-by-12 field of play in which there are four robots required to go through a set of tasks such as hitting three plastic flags with balls. Axles fall apart, chains loosen, motors break down. “People screaming and yelling. They did an awesome job. If I had to do that, I could not do it,” says O’Brien.
2018–19 will be the school’s 11thyear of competition, which will start in December and culminate with Southern New England competition in March. Cyber security tournaments run once a month to qualify for a February round. The SeaPerch details have not been released yet, though last year there was a March competition at Central Connecticut State University.
Everyone on Hyperspace agrees that they like to win, and this is what motivates the team to come to school starting in July to get a jump on things. They’ve been iterating and problem-solving since then. Team member Colin Thorpe explained that they’d at first built an arm for their robot that was long enough to pitch a ball at a target, but discovered its length was unstable. So they had to get into physics, and figure out the perfect ratio of throwing power to stability.
The team explicitly sets the world championship as their goal. “We are here to put our best foot forward. We are here to innovate. We are like the patriots: Superbowl or bust.”
For a long time, Mount Everett was the only school west of Springfield competing in robotics. Then Lenox came on with a team and, together with a school in Lincoln, the three formed an alliance and won state championships in 2013, 2014 and 2015. That 2015 team, the Higgs Bots, made it all the way to St. Louis and the world championships.
Overall, the STEM Academy courses are run with more flexibility and student self-direction than traditional classes. Online components are complemented with hands-on workshops. 3D engineering is an introductory course, after which, if they find they have an affinity for technology, students can transition to the other courses.
This year there are 18 students, an uptick that Thompson attributes to the “MakerSpace” experiences that students have had in earlier grades. The current crop of Hyperspace teammates came up through the middle school’s MakerSpace program before seguing into robotics.
The Flying Cloud Institute is now in charge of those in-school programs, and executive director Maria Rundle credits MakerSpaces, in which students work independently on open-ended problems and projects, with allowing “students freedom to formulate their own meaningful questions about real world phenomena, conduct their own investigations or design their own solutions, and test how successfully they addressed the challenge.”
One area for growth in the STEM field overall is evening out the gender playing field. Flying Cloud focused much of its programming on getting girls engaged in the sciences, and hopes to partner its Girls in Science program this year with STEM Academy’s underwater robotics class. This year there are three girls in the STEM Academy and one in the afterschool offering. Thompson acknowledged: “It’s more male-oriented, and that’s something we would like to change. Those things are changing, but it will take more time.” Thompson and O’Brien actually gauge the time they’ve been doing robotics by its first participant, Samantha, or Samee, Swartz, who graduated from Worcester Polytechnic Institute and is working for Google. Samee got her start in STEM with Flying Cloud’s camp, which she started at age 6.
Gov. Charlie Baker and the state education department are promoting the third week of October 2018 as “STEM Week.” As part of its involvement, the STEM Academy will bring its students to the fifth grade, “get drones in their hands, show them about how to navigate them.”
Funding sources for Mount Everett’s STEM Academy are both private and public. The federal Perkins grant supports the district’s vocational technical programs in robotics, culinary arts and carpentry. The Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation’s Eagle Fund is the biggest foundation supporter, and local business Plaskolite, formerly Sheffield Plastics and Covestro, has also provided grant funding. In 2015 the robotics team raised $15,000 from the community for its trip to St. Louis.
The next stage in the STEM Academy’s evolution will, Thompson said, be conversations with employers to align STEM study with open jobs. “This is our first year of calling it a STEM academy, so now it is more bona fide. Freshmen may be ones that can tell us that, in four years, there are jobs waiting for them.”
