The Shifting Educational Landscape: Chelsey Roebuck at TEDxColumbiaEngineering
good afternoon for as long as I can remember I've always been fascinated about education my mother's a teacher and so I spent my early years growing up on the floor of a classroom but for me it was a bit troubling because I realized that uh the traditional Educational Systems were not catered to students like myself creative thinkers who like to be outside of the box so I started thinking about ways where we could revolutionize education there's a lot of organizations that are very successful right now uh using Innovative Concepts like flipping the classroom which uh is uh it's a term that's used to uh describe uh platforms like KH Academy which uh flipping the classroom is basically uh flipping the work which is traditionally done in a classroom and it's sent home and the work that's traditionally done as homework is brought into the classroom so students would be assigned KH Academy videos or lectures recorded by teachers to watch at home so that when they came to class they could get individualized attention from the teacher or work in groups to solve problems in the developing world or Africa where we've done most of our work the there's not a lot of Education Innovation however there's a great deal of tech technological innovation so in Nairobi Kenya for instance 74% of Kenyans own cell phones The Economist recently dubbed uh Nairobi Kenya the Silicon Savannah for a sheer volume of people who are using technology what we seek to do is utilize this growing Trend to deliver a flexible uh and free educational platform to our students cell phone usage is so popular in places like Ghana where you can't even take a group picture without catching someone on their cell phone I look at images like this and it looks fun to me it's a playground a lot of you may look at it and say it's a junkyard but to me there's plenty of resources that can be used to hack build and create things like tires and inner tubes can be used to recreate devices or even LCDs or CRT monitors so we are looking to create an educational platform that will use locally sourced materials or junk to teach students this student here Foster dorker is a student who through one of our summer programs in Ghana learned to was introduced to software engineering he continued to study software engineering at an internet cafe in the evening uh being taught over the Internet by one of our instructors from Virginia using a platform called logme in.com where they can basically share a computer screen Foster has gotten so good at programming in the last year that he's getting prepared to take the AP Computer Science exam in Ghana in May and it'll be the first time that the AP exam for computer science will be offered in Ghana so they're we petition the College Board and they're going to offer it for our students who are ready additionally using just random materials if we find rope and pulley we can teach students about forces and distributed for our es so really finding any materials that are at our disposal and helping to show our students how they can apply it to solve real world problems I'm going to take a step back and talk a little bit about our history so the project uh that the name of the nonprofit is called emerging leaders in Technology and Engineering it was actually uh spun out of an undergraduate project that uh I've created with a classmate Clayton dolman and uh basically we were lucky enough to be awarded a $10,000 Grant as part of the Catherine waserman Davis projects for peace and we decided to use the money to buy science equipment we literally got cardboard boxes and filled them with computers microps breadboards anything science related that we could find we stuffed it into cardboard boxes and bought plane tickets to Ghana none of us had ever been to Africa I'd actually never traveled outside the country so if you can imagine a bunch of 18 or 19y old kids with cardboard boxes piled high walking into the mass that's a CRA but something magical happened within a week we had set up a 4-week engineering and science summer camp for 60 students so 60 students came every day for four weeks some of whom walked up to 2 hours to attend our classes we tried to focus on locally relevant issues recycling any materials that we could find so finding hoses and pipes and using that to build a drip irrigation system for the school Community um they mentioned that water was a scarce resource there and that they needed to grow crops so we racked our brains together and said well why don't we build a drip irrigation system we then modeled our curriculum around this and said well we can teach students about pressure and flow rate and all of those things and building our curriculum basically on the fly around the locally sourced materials that we found fast forward 3 years 3 years later we've now run programs in Ghana Jamaica and Tanzania and Ghana in partnership with two universities the University of Cape coast and All Nations University which have given us full access to all of their Labs materials uh faculty professors everything and also in partnership with a primary school this summer in Tanzania so taking it a step back uh instead of working with high school students to teach just a basic engineering and science uh exposure course to elementary and middle school students in Tanzania we're very excited to announce uh our upcoming program for this uh July 2013 will be in FBLA Mexico at the Ana Research Center um which I'm really excited for because Ana actually has one of the largest radio telescopes in the entire world and our students will have access to not only the Machinery but the people who operate so we try to combat this idea of changing education through three different Avenues the first is increasing access the second is to build a sense of community within our students and the third is to affect the internal motivations of our students we think that if we can affect change in each of these three areas we can develop Engineers from any Community this boy here is a boy uh who lives in the village where we lived our first year in Ghana a small satellite Village called oedon which is the engineers Without Borders Village for Columbia um he's a he was a 12 or 13y old boy that we just saw walking down the street one day and he'd found basically old radio parts and created his own speaker box and he was in the process of Designing his own radio so if we can find students like this and give them access to resources imagine the type of things that they can do community we also try to connect our students to resources and people who can support their growth so this is a student who attended the National Society of black Engineers conference with us in Ghana which is also attended by representatives from an organization called jaica it's basically the Japanese version of the peace score so through talking with him and learning more about Asia this student actually just applied for admission to a university in Japan I don't know if he'll get accepted but I hope that he does because he seems really passionate about that and finally internal motivations one of Ghana's greatest thinkers uh Patrick AO who's also the founder of uh aesi University there says that the ability to create is one of the most powerful things that we can do for an individual I think that our students seem to fully Embrace this understanding that by using their surroundings and learning from them they can change the world so everything from using recycled soda bottles or water bottles and and uh pots and pans and heaters students can make uh water purification systems so everything from particular filters to what's down below is a little tank that boils the water and distills it uh to solar powered radio so finding an old broken radio figuring out which wires need to be connected and then connecting it to a solar panel so students without being able to afford batteries can listen to radios um and this summer we introduced a robotic a robotics class using an arino micro processor so we use these robots to teach software engineering and electronics before I close I I want you guys to close your eyes while I tell a story the student on the right in the red is Ibraham anusa Ibraham has been one of our greatest students we've worked with him for three years in Ghana Ibraham lives in a household with about 13 or 14 people Ibraham had never studied science prior to working with us but through our program became very very interested in science and specifically Computer Engineering so much so that after graduating from high school Ibraham got a job as an IT instructor at a local Middle School while he saves up money to apply for admission to a university where he can study Computer Engineering but what's the Innovation behind what we're doing sure we're using locally sourced material to teach students about engineering and science but there's another part to that another part that is an idea that's be being developed right now into a product which is to capitalize on this rise in cell phone usage in Africa and find a way to embed our curriculum into a flexible mobile platform where students anywhere can learn so a student could send a text message to say I found a bicycle wheel and a bicycle fork and it could that m message could go into a database which could give the student not only a list of projects that they could build with these materials but also instructions on how to build it so they could say I have a wheel and a fork and the issue that I need to address is transportation and it would pull up instructions for how to build a bamboo bicycle similarly if the issue was energy maybe it would give him instructions for how to build a low Tech vertical axis one turbine so our idea is to build curriculum out of local junk and figure out a way to inspire students to work with it to build and create and we think that if we're successful we'll find a whole new generation of Engineers coming from developing communities everywhere thank you