(upbeat music)

Without any further ado, let's go ahead and get started with my presentation this morning: STEM for ALL: Best Practices for Inclusivity in the STEM Classroom. Before I dive into the presentation, I want to acknowledge that I stand on the shoulders of giants. Through my work at VEX Robotics, I've had the wonderful opportunity to collaborate with some amazing people who are deeply involved in this area. One of them is here today, Dr. Maya Israel. Where's Maya? There she is. Maya will be conducting a workshop, and much of her work over the past few years is reflected in this presentation. Another influential figure is Dr. David Winetrop, who presented yesterday but had to leave last evening. Their work has been a significant influence on me.

Not only their work, but as a self-proclaimed nerd, I often delve into papers, exploring footnotes to further my understanding. This process has shaped my thinking about ensuring STEM education is accessible to all students. I want to emphasize that I truly stand on the shoulders of giants in this field.

So, how do we properly address the challenge of inclusivity in our STEM classrooms? This is a topic I, along with VEX, think about extensively, and I'm sure it's on your minds as well. We became educators to teach all of our students, not just some. When considering STEM education, we must address the challenge of inclusivity. This presentation will focus on how we should think about and approach this issue.

There are many methodologies, such as UDL, that we could discuss, and I'm happy to engage in those conversations. However, today, I want to maintain a higher-level perspective. It's crucial to approach the problem correctly before delving into specific solutions.

As I mentioned, I'm a nerd and read extensively. A couple of books have significantly influenced my thinking, particularly from a product perspective. One such book is "The Innovator's Dilemma." When I transitioned from the classroom to EdTech, my first boss recommended this book. It contains an insightful quote: "When the best firms succeed, they succeed because they listen to their customers. Ironically, they fail for the exact same reason, due to listening to their customers."

What does this mean? A prime example is Uber. Throughout my formative years, I was advised by my mother, grandmother, and peers never to get in a car with a stranger. Police officers even reinforced this message during school assemblies. Yet, Uber's entire business model is based on this concept. Innovation initially lacks a market; if it had one, it wouldn't be innovative. This is our challenge as educators and as a company like VEX. How can we develop truly innovative solutions to address equity and inclusivity for all students?

Thank you for your attention, and I look forward to exploring these ideas further with you.

Yes, we need to listen to our teachers, but if the problem was just that, then we would've probably solved this already. We really have to think about being innovative, and this requires us to try and experiment. Of course, we're going to fail, but oftentimes, we talk about our students embracing failure. As teachers and as schools, we oftentimes have a very difficult time embracing failure and viewing it as an opportunity to learn. That's the only way we're going to learn.

So, what are we doing that is truly innovative in our classrooms to make sure that we are broadening participation in STEM? It's not just about access or providing classes for all of your students. Yes, you have a classroom full of diverse students. Is that it? Are you done? Are you going to pat yourself on the back and say, "Okay, I did a great job for inclusivity today"? No, that's not just it. It's not just about getting the students into the room; it's about making sure they have an opportunity to succeed once they're there. The only way we can do that is by truly being innovative. That's the first step.

Music Cue

Step two, Claire Cameron, one of my favorite people, wrote a fantastic book. When I talked about standing on the shoulders of giants, I should have mentioned Claire also. Our young students, especially those with special needs and those from underrepresented populations, are not being put in a position to succeed. What do I mean by that? They lack skills like executive function, motor skills, and spatial reasoning skills.

What do we do for these kids oftentimes? I was a hundred percent guilty of this when I taught. We tell them to sit down and be still. Why can't you just sit down and be still? Why won't you just sit down and listen? Why are you constantly bouncing off the walls? We ask these students to sit passively in our classrooms, especially in younger classrooms. These students lack skills in executive function, motor skills, and spatial skills.

One of the most important aspects of Claire's book is that all of these things work together; it's an interconnected web. She talks about executive function, spatial reasoning, and motor skills needing to be fostered together for our students to be put in a position to learn. This is not controversial from a research perspective. It's very clear. If your students lack executive functioning skills, they're not going to be able to learn in a classroom effectively.

What are we doing for those young students? How are we putting them in a position to be successful? Claire's book is called "Hands On, Minds On." How often are we giving students the opportunity to engage in that type of learning in K-2? Or are we drilling them on sight words? Of course, students need to learn their sight words and multiplication facts. But why do we have to do it in a passive way? Why do we have to ask students to sit for six and a half hours still in a desk to learn those skills? We don't have to do that. But when we do, we're putting our students in a position to fail.

I saw this at a conference, Learning & The Brain conference, which is a fantastic conference. I went there and saw Dr. J.

Music Cue

Thank you for your attention and commitment to improving education. Let's continue to innovate and support all our students in their learning journeys.

Stewart Ablon gave this presentation on his book and his work, and he said this quote right here, and it literally kept me awake for like three days. I couldn't fall asleep. "Changing behavior is a matter of skill and not will." He went through literally dozens of examples of this in his work.

Now again, I am a hundred percent guilty of this when I taught. When my students were a behavior problem in my classroom, you better 100% believe I treated it as a problem of their will and not their skill. They're misbehaving because they are choosing to misbehave. They're misbehaving because they don't want to learn. They're not sitting still in their seat because they want to be disruptive, and all those particular things. But oftentimes, more often than not, it's because they lack the skill. Many of those skills I talked about on the previous slide, like executive function. But we don't do anything in schools to really address those skills. Instead, we treat it as a matter of will.

Now, oftentimes, we don't do this in business. Hopefully, I think, hopefully. If you have a worker, right? If you're in a management position, you have someone that's not performing up to their task, oftentimes, you don't think that John came to work today just on purpose to try to mess up everything as possible. That's why John, on his bus ride this morning, was thinking, "I'm gonna do these nine things to completely ruin this project, or completely ruin everybody else's day." No, we don't do that. We think it's a process problem. Or we think it's a communication problem. Maybe that person didn't have the necessary skills in order to succeed. They needed more knowledge, and this, that, and the other thing. It could be a problem with hardware, right? They don't have the right hardware in order to be able to get the project to completion. These are the conversations that we have, at least I hope we have, in our workforce every single day. But that's not the perspective that we have with our students. The perspective that we have with our students is you're misbehaving because you want to, and you want to be disruptive. You like the attention. You like to make other students laugh in the classroom. And that's not actually true.

So again, that kept me up for about three or four days.

Last one, I shared this quote. I had an opportunity to participate in a panel by Google at a conference in Portland recently. I love this quote, so this quote is by the author Jorge Borges: "Enchanted by its rigor, humanity forgets, and continues to forget that it is a rigor of chess masters, not angels." What does this quote mean? This quote means that all of us are trying to make sense of our world. All of us are trying to figure out what's going on, right? All of us are trying to make sense of our world. So the rigor of chess master means, what Borges is talking about here is that we create our own realities. All of us create our own realities in order to make sense of the world. All of us do that.

How does that translate to us in education? I create classrooms that I would like to be in. I design tests that I think are true and authentic measures of assessment. I teach and talk about things that I think are interesting. I create an atmosphere in my classroom that I would enjoy being in. That is the rigor of chess masters. We all do that 100% of the time. As an EdTech company, we create products that we think are cool, we think are interesting, we think are fun, and we think teach things and things that I would enjoy doing, right? And we don't look at things through the lens or through the perspectives of our students.

This is why I always say, and I think people think I'm joking or I'm playing to the audience when I say this, but this is why I say this, and I believe this with every fiber in my being, that teaching is the most difficult job in the world. A hundred percent. Because in order to be an effective teacher, you have to be able to look at things and appreciate the perspective of all of your students. And if you're teaching middle school or high school, you might have a hundred students. Think about how challenging that actually is, and think about how difficult that is. What can I do to reach that individual student? That's a very challenging task to be able to do that, because again, we look at things through our own eyes.

So the takeaway from all of this is, when we talk about inclusivity in our classrooms, we oftentimes talk about all this stuff up here. The tip of the iceberg stuff, okay? I don't have the right training, which is true. Okay? I'm lacking resources, of course, it's true. Yes, you're lacking resources, okay? I don't have the right supports in my school. Of course, that's true, yes. But what's the real problem? The real problem is us and our perceptions, and the real problem is our schools are not set up for our students to succeed. That's the real problem.

Okay, so, number one, the real problem is us. And again, like I said, a hundred percent guilty, right here, when I was in the classroom, I wanted to send like a letter of apology to all my former students, right? The problem is us. And the problem is, is our schools are not really set up for our students to succeed. I would argue that most of the time our schools are set up for efficiency. We have all of these kids that we have to educate. So how can we figure out the most effective model to get them from here to here, and to move them through like a throughput problem, right? And that's the wrong way to look about it. And that does not put our students in a position to be successful.

So, when I talk about this in terms of the real problem, just to go into a little bit more detail, it is my, Tim, where's Tim? Man, I don't know, Tim's probably out in the hallway fixing stuff. But this is Tim's favorite analogy here. Bike-shedding, right? So this comes from a term that was coined, bike-shedding, imagine that you were being put in charge of building a nuclear power plant, okay? It's a hard thing to do. Not an easy thing, hard thing to do. Build a nuclear power plant. Well, as part of that power plant, the workers want, they're gonna ride their bikes to work. So they wanna place a shed to put their bikes. So what do all the engineers do? Instead of working on the hard stuff, the stuff that's consequential and hard up here, they spend all their time designing the bike shed. Why, because it's easy. I'm not gonna focus on the things that are consequential and hard. Instead, I'm gonna focus on the things down here that are easy and trivial, like the bike shed.

You know what's easy and trivial right now? Banning cell phones. We're gonna cure all of our problems in education by taking away kids' cell phones. That's what we're gonna do. We're gonna take away their cell phones. Now, should we take away their cell phones? I don't know. Maybe, maybe not. But we're gonna spend all of this time talking about taking away kids' cell phones. Why? That's why. Because it's easy to do that. It's so easy to do that. We're gonna have long conversations about grade inflation. How do you inflate a grade, by the way? What does that even mean? We're gonna talk about grade inflation, front page, New York Times, Yale University, accused of inflating grades, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That's why we do those things.

So when we talk about how we're not really setting our schools up to be successful, that's what we mean by that, okay?

All right, so I've talked a lot about how to approach the problem, how to think about the problem, and what I think some of the really, really real problems are. How can we help with it? I love this framework. This framework, you see the source down here, Equity-Oriented Conceptual Framework for K-12 STEM literacy. This is not a panacea, obviously, but I think this is a good way to think about the answer to the problem, okay?

And you see in the middle here, this is really important. So if you think about STEM for ALL, or CS for ALL, right? Why? Why do we want all of our students to participate in high-quality STEM education and have meaningful learning experiences? Why do we want all of our students to participate in high-quality computer science education and have meaningful learning experiences? Why are we doing that?

If we approach it from the lens of providing them with personal relevancy and meaningful action, that's a much better approach to take with it. Okay? Give students the opportunity to enact real change that is relevant to them within their communities. That's why we're trying to introduce STEM for ALL. That's why we're trying to introduce CS for ALL, okay? Not so they can learn arrays, okay? Not so they can learn loops, but for this, give them an opportunity to do this.

Okay, so that's the inside. Because if you don't start with that, if you don't start with that, then really, none of this really matters. Okay? Would you teach Hamlet just focusing on the rhyming scheme? Would you just talk about the iambic pentameter? Or as Harold Bloom wrote, you know, Hamlet was the invention of the human. It gives you an opportunity to derive meaning in your own life. That's what great literature is, right? And that's what great teachers emphasize when they teach great literature. Not, "Hey, look at how these words were put together." But when we teach STEM and we teach computer science, that's oftentimes what we focus on. It's oftentimes what we focus on, okay?

So then outside of this, we have all these different things to look at. So again, dispositions, STEM identity, empowerment, critical thinking, and problem solving, utility and-- And if I can talk, and then empathy, I'm just gonna skip it. And empathy. So now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go through each of these and talk about them. Okay? And when I look at these things, what do I think about?

So, dispositions, right? And I'm not gonna spend a lot of time on this because I think everybody here knows this. I'm kind of preaching to the choir. But the importance of starting STEM early, right? We need to, the research is very clear. Students, even as young as four years old, form an opinion about their proficiency and their ability and their identity in STEM. This is something I can do. This is something I can't do, I can see myself as being a computer scientist or not. Once that opinion is formed, it's very, very difficult to change. Research is very clear on that.

So it's our job to make sure that we provide students with meaningful learning experiences when they're young, to capture their interests before they form those negative perceptions and those negative attitudes. Okay? So when we talk about dispositions in STEM, we have to talk about equipping our young students and really starting STEM early. Okay? So this is one of my big ones right here, okay?

So we talk about, you know, being able to apply what they're learning and the utility of what they're learning. We can have the best ideas in the world, right? We can really wanna make sure that we're really raising student agency, like I talked about a minute ago. We can really make sure that we're emphasizing things like executive function amongst our young students, and trying to provide them with meaningful and authentic learning experiences when they're young. But if you mess up assessment, you're gonna just throw everything out the window. Okay?

Thank you for your attention and for being part of this important conversation. Let's continue to work together to make STEM education accessible and meaningful for all students.

I have a quote at the beginning of each chapter in my book, right? For my chapter on assessment, the quote is:

"Mr. McKenna, is this going to be graded?"

This question was asked by literally thousands of students throughout my academic career. I hated that question. It used to make me so angry. I'd be all excited about a thing. "Okay, we're gonna do blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Here we go. Any questions?" And then, "Yes, Mr. McKenna, is this gonna be graded?" I wanted to jump out the window. I absolutely wanted to jump out the window.

But why were they asking that question? The hard truth is, and these are my apology notes I need to write, that was the incentive system I created in my classroom. That's what mattered. The grade. All this wonderful stuff I was talking about, all this learning I was talking about, I was not incentivizing my students to care about that. My incentive structure in my classroom was for the grade at the end.

So my kids would turn in their language arts essays, I'd ask them to write something three or four pages long. I would spend hours checking, writing comments, underlining things, circling things, putting stamps on things, all that great stuff. And then I'd give it back to them. What would they do? Go to the last page, look at the grade, and throw it away. All that stuff I wrote, they just ignored. And I, because I was clueless, used to give detention to the kids when I found their papers in the trash cans at the end of class because it made me angry. I was gonna get them back for doing that, right?

But again, what do I realize now? It was the incentive structure I created in my classroom, which meant all they cared about was that letter grade I circled on the last page of the paper, not all the wonderful stuff that came before it.

Assessment should be done with students, not to students. I could spend an entire keynote talking about that, so I'm not gonna spend too much time on it now. But assessment should be student-centered. The question I want you to ask yourself is: Are you assessing performance or actual learning? Are you assessing student performance or actual learning? And provide them with real-world applications of that.

Just one more thing about assessment: Goodhart's law. When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Why? Because we all game the system. You do this, I do this, everybody does this, right? If your boss told you tomorrow, "If you do these 10 things, you will get a $15,000 bonus," guess what? You're gonna do those 10 things. You're gonna figure out how to get those 10 things done to get that bonus. No ifs, ands, or buts about it. Did you add value to your customer? Who cares, I did these 10 things. Did you make something in your company better? Who cares, I did these 10 things. Did we complete the project? Who cares, I did these 10 things. That's Goodhart's law. And we all do it, all of us do it. All of us do it 100%, all of us do it.

We just got done with the NFL draft, right? What do all those athletes do in the weeks and months leading up to the draft? They practiced the 40-yard dash, they practiced the vertical jump. They did all those things because they knew if they ran the 40-yard dash fast and had a high jump and did all these things, they would get a better draft position. Did they become better football players? Nah. But they were hitting the target.

So, how do we get around this? Well, actually have a conversation with your students. So when students suddenly step up and say, "Hey, we have this project we're trying to do. What do you think you would have to do and learn to be successful at this project?" Have a conversation about it. Co-create learning targets with your students. And then have conversations with them throughout the process.

Thank you for your attention and for considering these ideas. I hope they help you create a more engaging and meaningful learning environment for your students.

Have them document their learning in something like an engineering notebook. And then at the end of it, have another conversation with them and say, okay, how do we do here? Right? That's what we do, that's what good businesses do all the time, right? Right, have those conversations. But again, it's difficult to have those conversations if your school has emphasized efficiency. So again, I can talk about assessment for four hours, but I think you get the point.

Obviously, identity development, we talk about this all the time. It is so important, it is so important that we give students an opportunity to see people in STEM that look like them, that talk like them, that act like them, and come from their communities. Okay-, it's really, really important that we do that. All right, it's important that we do that. We provide students with opportunity to see people again, that look like them and act like them and are from their communities that are doing STEM or being successful in STEM. Our keynote yesterday, Louie, Director of DoD STEM, talked about this a lot and talked about a lot of what DoD STEM is trying to do to help you with that. So I would strongly encourage you to pursue that and pursue those resources that Louie and Dr. Grella talked about yesterday that the DoD STEM provides, okay?

Empowerment, this is my favorite part about the VEX Robotics Competition. My absolute favorite part about it. Student agency is hard in regular classrooms. Because again, in most classrooms, you are not put in a position to be successful where you can create projects that really empower students and allow them to build their own agency. Because, I hate to say it, but it's true. You probably got a principal saying, Hey, we gotta raise these test scores, did you cover this material? Okay? And as long as we're having those conversations, instead of conversations about raising student agency, you're never going to be able to do it effectively.

The reason why I fell in love with robotics in STEM was not because I'm a tinkerer and not because I'm an engineer, I'm none of those things. You saw the books at the beginning, I'm reading in my spare time, I'm not trying to build something, okay? This is my robot. Go talk to the students in the pits, why we do the pit walk. Go talk to the students, they can't wait to show you theirs, because their teacher didn't make their robot. Their teacher didn't come up with a drive train. Their teacher didn't come up with the code, they did, okay. They did. The teacher didn't come up with who was gonna do what on the team. Who's gonna be the driver, who's gonna be the engineer. They figured that out on their own, okay? They figured that out. That's what they did.

I was, when I went through the pits, I talked to Seth's team. Seth's sitting right over here. I asked this little girl, I said, why do you love VEX Robotics? And she said, I love VEX Robotics because I love building a robot and I love my team. Okay? And like I said, I think I said this yesterday. I was terrible at group work, terrible at it. When I taught, one student would do all the work, a second student would sleep, and the third student would cause problems. Those are my groups. For 15 years when I taught, that's what they did. With robotics, and something like what we're doing here, you have robust student collaborations, okay? Robust student collaborations. And it's such an effective and powerful thing to be able to do.

And then the last part about that then is in terms of empowerment, to go back to that middle hub, what are we doing to help students in their own community? And this is what I love about our excellence award here at VEX, okay? The most prestigious award that we have at VEX is the Excellence Award. In order to be able to get the Excellence Award, you have to be doing things like this. Are you mentoring other young robotics teams? Are you helping out with coaches and doing those types of things?

I know Daniel from Caution Tape will be speaking later on, and he can speak about that much better than I can because his teams have won that award. So, I'll allow him to wax poetic about that later.

Critical thinking and problem solving, students value STEM in their personal lives and apply their knowledge and curiosity further. Again, just saying the same thing here again. Provide students, excuse me, with the opportunity to solve problems that are relevant and meaningful to them and their community. Oftentimes, we think that students, especially from urban communities, want to leave their community. No, they love their community. That's why they wear shirts that have the name of their community on it. They love their community. They don't want to leave their community. They want to help their community. They want to enact meaningful change in their community. So you need to stop telling kids, "Hey, STEM is the key for you to get out of this neighborhood." They love their neighborhood. If they want to leave their neighborhood, then leave it up to them, okay? But give them a way to powerfully do those connections in their community.

So a quote from my book, because I think it's important as we talk about this, "STEM is a mirror that reflects our world and its complexity." Oftentimes we try to, for lack of a better term, dumb things down for our students. Let's stop doing that. Okay, let's stop doing that. Let's tell the students that they can actually wonder. They can form a hypothesis, test it. Empower students to answer their questions about their world. Okay, again, the reason why STEM fits into what we're talking about so well in terms of student agency, because it gives them an opportunity to ask questions about their world, about their community, and find the resources and the ways to be able to help them with it. Okay?

Last thing is empathy. Okay, empathy. Care for one another. Care for the world around them. Observing without evaluating, this is a big one right here. So what do I mean by that? Okay, there's a famous quote that "observe without evaluating is the highest form of intelligence." Okay, I did a lot of observing and evaluating when I taught, right? Johnny didn't do his homework because he's lazy. That's evaluating. As opposed to just saying, Johnny didn't do his homework. Okay? Johnny gets up out of his seat all the time because he likes to be disruptive. Okay? Empathy means that we observe without evaluating. Okay, that's what empathy actually means. Okay, and that's a very difficult thing to do, and none of us will ever be able to do it a hundred percent of the time. But we need to work at it. And it's something that we need to introduce to our students very well also.

And this is a great resource right here. Problem-based, design thinking task, engage in student empathy and STEM. You can see the source down here for it. These slides will all be in PD+, but if you want to take a picture of that, that's a great resource that shows you how to use STEM as a vehicle for empathy. Okay? It's a great resource.

So the last thing I'll leave you with, again, this is another great paper. The source down here, "Racial Justice Amidst the Dangers of Computing Creep." It's a fantastic article. It's actually a dialogue between two researchers where they're asked questions and they go through and answer them. And I think this really captures everything that I was trying to talk about today. And this is what I mean by talking about how we approach something and how we think about something. As we're thinking about our students and we're thinking about STEM, let's not focus on abstract concepts. Let's not focus just on developing technical competencies. Instead, let's develop skills in ways that ground computing or STEM in their lives. That's that middle hub, like I was talking about before. That's that middle hub. Personal agency, meaningful and relevant learning.

Why do we want STEM for all?

Why? Because we want to give students an opportunity to develop skills that are grounded in their lives. We want to empower them in their lives, and we want them to be more empathetic in their lives, okay? We want them to be critical thinkers and problem solvers in things that are grounded in their lives. Okay? So again, when we think about STEM for ALL, I think this is a very nice way for us to think about it. But again, if we're not focused on this in the middle, it's gonna be impossible for us to do any of this at the end.

I thank you very much for your attention, and I'll be more than happy to answer whatever questions you may have at this point. But thank you.

(audience applauds)

If you do have a question, we have microphones. I would just ask for you to wait until Tim or Tom or somebody else gets you a microphone. But I'd be happy to answer. We got about 10 minutes for questions. If any questions, we'd be happy to answer them for you. Somebody has to break the ice. Somebody goes first and we go, there we go. Thank you very much, I appreciate you. I'm gonna break the ice with just a little bit of humor, but I just want to know if by chance, in your book you included the apology letter? You know what, that is such a great idea. And I a hundred percent should have done that in the acknowledgements. Yeah, I did, I did, I did dedicate my book to the students, but I didn't say I was sorry. (laughs) I'm sorry for all the things that are in my book that I didn't do when I was in my classroom, but no, you're right, thank you for that. Book two, I'll put it in there, yeah.

Other questions? Well, first of all, thank you all for coming here. Thank you for the master's keynote. Really shook me in so many levels. It will change the way I approach my class. I would say, well, you were speaking, I was deeply touched, really. But I was thinking about where I come from. And in South America, we have some problems, right? About if we can do things. What I haven't seen, I want to give me some thought about, there are some mindsets of probably because of politics over there, the government, we are always in poverty. We have resources, but there is no, there's no try to do. Can we do this if when I present, if I present these models, the governor, or the people will feel like this is too much for us. Like we cannot do it. So is there a feedback about that that you can give me? Because I want to be an evangelist of this and go to those countries to try to convince people in power, Hey, let's do this for kids. Yeah. Because the love for the students, right? But I wonder because I've been already, oh, but we cannot do this. It's like a mindset or a spiritual thing maybe that we are oppressed by so many system in the past that we don't have the drive to, for example, here, right? Let's do this, the USA, pride, America, we can do this. We're the best, but we don't have that in all the South American countries, right? Where I'm coming from, Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay, Uruguay, Chile. So I would love to have you there someday. And as a representative-- Let's go on a tour. So that's why I say, so thank you so much again. And I would like to some feedback about that. What can we do about this?

No, that's a great question. So I think, I think a couple, a couple quick comments about that. Number one, the best way to enact change, in my opinion, is to model it. Okay, so in my classroom, I try to do those things and you'll actually have a very, very powerful impact just by doing that around the teachers, around you, in your school in general. But just number one, you know, if, and like you said, changing your own thinking and changing your approach and really kind of embodying that and being a symbol of that, that is hugely impactful. And you shouldn't just think, oh, I'm just doing this like in my classroom, because that's actually a lot. So that's number one.

Number two, you're a hundred percent right in that if this was an easy conversation to have with people, then we'd be having it all the time, but it's not, right? So I think it's important to identify what small steps you can do and what you can actually do to enact change, and then go ahead and start to implement some of those things. It could be something as simple as having a conversation with your principal, or like you said, at the MOE level in those particular countries.

Hey, let's adapt the principles of the universal design for learning. Let's take a look at these principles and see how we can adjust our curriculum to really adapt to these principles well. And let's see how we can train our teachers in UDL. That's a great first step right there. Let's take a look at assessment, right? How can we make assessment more student-centered? What can we do with that? That's another great step right there. What can we do in these countries to allow students to see and model STEM careers from people that came from their communities? Can we do that? Or can we do all of them, right? So I think just taking each of those bits of those things and taking a look at them and understanding what we can actually do now, I think we can go through it and we can do that.

The problem that we always have in education, because we love our students so much, is we always want to get to the top of the mountain. So we see the mountain, just like you're seeing the mountain right now. I want to get to the top of the mountain, right? How do I, do I take this route? Do I take that route? Do I go this way? What equipment do I need? I need to get to the top of the mountain. The most important thing to recognize is when you get to the top of the mountain, what's on the other side is another mountain. And there's gonna be another mountain. There's gonna be another mountain, and that's okay. There's nothing wrong with that. Nothing wrong with that at all. That's the journey, right? So appreciate the steps in the journey and not getting to the top of the mountain. We love our kids, so we want to get to the top of the mountain. Understand there's just more mountains. That's okay, that's how teachers get burned out. Okay, that's okay. There's gonna be another mountain. Understand what steps you need to take and enjoy that process and learn along the way.

You're very welcome. Thank you, Jason. That was a great presentation.

I'm from Ghana. I just want to relate to your story. Jason's book, I've been a, I can say it's a copy, right? I've been able to transfer his book into a teaching aid where we use it for training teachers. Now in our country, it is a bag of STEM. We have a minister that's lived in California for 25 years, set up the first inner city schools in California, and went back to Ghana, and then he became the Minister of Education. So the bag is of STEM, the building, all the STEM schools and all of that. But I can tell you, all these beautiful buildings have been put up. Teachers are, there's no curriculum for them. There's no materials for teachers. So how are you going to build all these nice houses and put our students in there?

So what we have done at Bountiful, we didn't go up to the minister, we went in the school districts. It's easier to work with the school districts than going to, because our system is so complex. We have the Minister of Education that does policy. Then we have the Ghana Educational Service, which are the implementers. They own the schools, they own the teachers. So if you go to the minister, he will give you a nice paper. If you go to the district, they will say, no, you need to work with us. So what we've done, especially with VEX products, there are a lot of free materials from VEX Labs. So we go to the school district, it's easy to work with the director of education, tell, look, this is what we're gonna do for your teachers.

We train the teachers and provide them with the resources. It's always better to start from where you can control, and now it's becoming very relevant. Today, when I do my presentation, I'll show you some of the things we've done. We've been able to use VEX content, working with the school of education. We developed a curriculum out of VEX that they're going to implement to train teachers in the coming fall for all new teachers, integrated in STEM, and then community STEM. Part of that includes robotics, which is all free materials.

Especially for those of us coming from international backgrounds, there are no resources. You won't find them. Even the school districts don't have a budget. They will tell you to your face, "We don't have a budget for this." But when we go there, we try to help them because we run as a business and also have a nonprofit that assists the school district. It is important to understand what you can take away. I see myself tapping into all these resources.

Yesterday, during the DoD presentation, I thought, "Wow, those are resources I can plug and play down there." Just look at the content and determine what is going to be useful in Argentina or Paraguay. Don't focus on the politicians; they are not going to help you. Work with the educators, the school directors, or in the US, the superintendents. They are ready to help, but they don't have the resources. If you can point them to free resources and offer to train their teachers, they will be interested. VEX has a lot of free resources, and you don't even need VEX products to use them. There are many materials in the community that you can use. When they see the impact, they will call you to the table.

I'm telling you, at the think tank in the country, anytime there's a STEM discussion, they call us. It's like, even for exhibitions, they want us to come because we're showing VEX products. We can tell them we have products from kindergarten all the way to high school, even to the university. It is important you look at us.

Thank you. Thank you, Seth. Appreciate that.

(audience applauds)

Some questions from the back, Tim. Hey Jason, why do you do what you do? And what inspired you? What inspired you to do everything that you've done so far?

You all inspire me, actually. I was scared to death to teach robotics when I first got started. The story I tell all the time is that I was burned out teaching. I needed a change. I got put in charge of our school's enrichment program. That was a change. My enrichment program fell under special education in my district. I went and talked to our director of special ed, had all these ideas. Got about halfway through my list, she stopped me and said, "Jason, I don't care what you do, just don't get us sued." I said, "Okay, thank you," and left.

I was successful in not getting us sued for about a month. I went back to my director of special ed and said, "Listen, I'm dying here. I was burned out, that's why I wanted this new position." She said, "Okay, I'll tell you what, give the kids a survey. Ask them what they want to do, and then I'll let you rewrite their GIEPs, and we'll go from there." I said, "Great." I was thinking these kids, because I was always a humanities guy, would want to learn Shakespeare, go see plays, read books, blah, blah, blah. They all came back and said, "We want to build robots and code." I was like, "Oh crap. I don't know anything about that at all," but I had to do it, right?

That feeling I had right there, it's my job basically to eliminate that. That's what gets me out of bed in the morning. I love talking to teachers and hearing feedback from them, hearing teachers say, "This is something I never thought I could do, and it has turned around my teaching career."

And hearing teachers say that, you know, they had students in urban schools, you know, you go over to our table over there from Woodland Hills, those kids talking about, before all they talk about was being a professional football player. Now they want to be engineers, right? So that's, you know, that's what gets me out of bed in the morning. That what really, you know, inspires me. Folks like Daniel and Seth, like I talked about, they inspire me, you know, to go out and do more. And yeah, that's why I do what I do, thank you.

Any other questions? I think we have time for one more. Got one here? Yes. Yes, maybe this, I'm almost, I'm embarrassed maybe about this question a little bit. Maybe I shouldn't be, but please don't be. As I think about personal relevancy and meaningful action, I think I tend to think the outer wheel. So I'm curious, like for a middle schooler, what is personal relevancy and meaningful action or for an elementary student, because I feel like they're nice words, but I need to like hear an example, you know, concrete. Like, this is what this could look like for a middle schooler or a high schooler.

Yeah, and that's a great point. And I purposely left that ambiguous because you will find the answer to that by talking to them, right? That's the key thing. So when I, I don't want you guys to feel like I'm trying to sell my book, but just as an example, like when I wrote my book, okay, my publishers were great, they were fantastic, but like, they were like, Jason, you've gotta give the teacher a concrete thing at the end, they could take away at the end. And like, I got so sick and tired of hearing that. I finally told them, I said, listen, it's like watching a movie. And at the end of the movie it's like, here's what you should have taken away from this movie. Bullet, bullet, bullet, and it's like, who does that? Right, like, why do we treat teachers like they're idiots? Like why does everything have to be, this is a concrete thing you could take away and put in your class, like.

So the reason why I left that ambiguous is, is you're right. There is no concrete thing. How we get that concrete thing is talk to your students, talk to your students, and the personal relevancy and meaningful, like the challenge there is is that to go back to this quote, the challenge there is we'll try to, we'll try to do that for them. We'll try to say, this is what you should be interested in, this is what you should want to do, this is what you should want to be able to do. But instead it's really about having that conversation with them. And you are exactly 100% right. Those conversations will be difficult at first, why? Because they're not used to having them, right? So to go back to our previously, you'll start small and then by the process of doing it more and more and more, you'll get more robust things from your students and you'll develop a great relationship with your students through the process of having those conversations with them.

Again, that's why assessment is such a great part of this or such an important part of it because if you're just slapping a grade on stuff, then these conversations then go out the window and it becomes 'Mr. McKenna, is this graded?' So, but thank you, that was a great question. Thank you for asking that.

Okay. We gotta go, right Nicole?

Yes. So, were you gonna say something? Go ahead.

I'll just mention that if you are a PD+ All-Access member, you can book a 1-on-1 session with Jason directly. So that can be done from your dashboard. You can meet with our education team, but you can specifically request to meet with Jason as well.

(audience applauds)