He’s talking about those dreaded words: “Why bother? I’m never going to use this anyway.”
Morris, a K-12 and college math teacher of nearly two decades, is working to erase that defeatist line from student lexicon. Last month, he was hired by CompTIA member Lenovo in part to help the laptop giant bring more hands-on relevance to science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) instruction.
Lenovo has plenty of reason to promote STEM education at the grassroots level. A global company with R&D centers in China, Japan and the United States, Lenovo routinely competes with other hi-tech companies to recruit and hire the researchers who can give it the leading edge.
If students aren’t inspired to stick with STEM early, they may be impossible to bring back to math and science. For Mike Schmedlen, director of worldwide education for Lenovo, it’s all about improving learning outcomes.
“I think there is a disconnect between the core principles that need to be learned (in school) and what the end result is,” says Schmedlen, who works out of Lenovo’s worldwide headquarters in Morrisville, N.C., but who also sits on a plethora of non-profit boards of STEM education organizations around the country.
“What we’re trying to do – through advanced simulation techniques and visualization and also the innovations in touch and pen input – is make the end result more accessible to students earlier, so they can see the fruits of their labor,” Schmedlen explains.
Lenovo’s STEM education advocacy falls into several action areas:
Discover and promote best practices in STEM education. In 2010, Lenovo founded the Education Research Initiative (ERI), an international research organization. This initiative is currently supporting a number of studies, including studying the effectiveness of online education methods and how students at different schools can collaborate on service-learning projects. (Research findings from Year One will be released during Lenovo’s ThinkTank conference at Georgetown University in July.)
Help K-12 teachers and their students bring technology alive. Company representatives have gone into hundreds of schools to help teachers use Lenovo technology. For example, at the Gwinnett School of Mathematics, Science and Technology in Atlanta, teachers are using 3D modeling software run on Lenovo ThinkPads to teach students engineering and product design.
Teach researchers how to teach. Great researchers don’t necessary shine when they stand in front of a classroom of undergraduates. Working with participants at the Center for Faculty Excellence at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is one way Lenovo is helping research professors become better inspirers of the next generation of researchers and teachers.
Positive change is visible, Schmedlen believes. For example, the Common Core curriculum standards developed by the U.S. Department of Education favor STEM fields. However, making sure enough students pursue careers in STEM fields will require a concerted effort among several parties.“We need transformation, and we need to develop advocacy not only in the teaching corps, but also in the parents and in the communities,” Schmedlen says.
Morris, whose title at Lenovo is Education Solutions Manager, has seen what can happen when teachers develop lesson plans with real-world problems and their students have the technology in hand to solve them.
For the first time, students are able to do real STEM work in class, using more than the proverbial calculator. Tools Lenovo and others have created are able to analyze data “that’s not made-up, that’s not sitting in a book” to solve real problems.
Eventually, it might even mean the end of the dreaded, “I’m never going to use this” line.
“You don’t have that question when you work with real data, when the applied side of things has been brought into the classroom.”
Instead, says Morris, students ask, “What do I want to be, so I can use this?”
CompTIA actively promotes philanthropy among its members and applauds the efforts of members who are making a difference. If your company or one you work with is giving back to the community, let us know by emailing Eric Larson, director of external relations for the CompTIA Educational Foundation, at elarson@comptia.org.
The CompTIA Educational Foundation helps populations traditionally under-represented in IT prepare for, secure and be successful in jobs within the IT industry.
