Originally posted on Policy Shop | The Demos Blog: Ideas for the Common Good on March 31, 2011. Reposted with the author’s consent.
I spent last weekend amidst screaming crowds, multi-colored pompoms, enthusiastic cheerleaders, numbered jerseys, intense competition and victorious underdogs. I was not at the NCAA tournament.
I was in downtown Manhattan on the 40th floor of a building literally overlooking the World Trade Center site. The event was a robotics competition among middle school students.
The contestants were products of after-school programs and public schools from around the city. Many of them were from working class and impoverished neighborhoods.
From the outside, they were just normal kids, like any other middle schoolers you might see walking on the street. They were not necessarily kids you’d identify as the science fair crowd, as honor students, or even as those who’d care that much about grades.
The contest, otherwise known as a FIRST LEGO League Robotics Scrimmage, was sponsored by the New York Academy of Sciences (NYAS) and the NYC Department of Youth and Community Development (DYCD).
Together NYAS and DYCD have developed a free after-school mentoring program for kids interested in science, technology, engineering and math. The program is for 4th through 8th graders and targets underserved and poorer neighborhoods.
Nine of the twenty teams who competed in the robotics competition were from the mentoring program. Others were from public schools, YMCAs and other organizations based in the city. The teams competed in different challenges based on research they had conducted and robots they had built and programmed.
What made the 150-200 kids in attendance so special was their playfulness and practicality. What they were engaged in was rapid-fire scientific problem solving. And they seemed to love it. They had not only learned to research hard questions in areas such as nanotechnology and biomedical engineering. They had learned to design robots and program them to complete complex tasks. Most importantly they had learned to adjust their thinking and respond to challenges on the fly.
Many of the kids were dressed up. Some wore blue battle fatigues, some wore lab coats, and some had team t-shirts. But they were not just playing a part. They were thinking and functioning as real scientists.
It was the practical application of knowledge that got the kids hooked, kept them engaged and taught them volumes.
It is not a revolutionary idea that we learn by doing. But it is one that is all too often overlooked and easily drowned out in the heavy-duty discussions, political debates and bitter battles that ensue surrounding educational policy.
In her latest book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System, Diane Ravitch makes the point that much of the rancor of school reform gets so caught up in itself that it forgets that:
School reform begins with determining what children should know and be able to do (the curriculum) and then proceeds to adjust other parts of the educational system to support the goals of learning.
How would current debates and discussions change if we truly used this as our point of orientation?
