In recent years, the United States has fallen behind other nations with educating students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. Only 16 percent of U.S. high school students are proficient in math and actively pursuing STEM careers. In a world run by technology, where the majority of jobs in the near future will require advanced education in technical fields, these trends are troubling and must be reversed.
Fortunately, the current STEM crisis is getting more attention as organizations and political figures are working on solutions. President Obama is among those looking to help the issue; and he has set in motion a plan to have American students “move from the middle to the top of the pack in science and math.” With the help of the Department of Education and the Committee of STEM education, the President wants to have the nation develop and retain 100,000 STEM teachers over the next ten years. To help meet this goal, the President has proposed adding $170 million in new funding to the 2015 fiscal budget to help jumpstart the training for the next generation of STEM educators.
The President’s plan mainly provides incentives and awards grants to school districts who adopt more STEM-friendly practices that will aim to get students interested in STEM subjects at an earlier age. Additionally, the plan rewards schools who recruit and train high quality STEM educators.
On the surface, the urgency and money with which President Obama and the educational community are addressing the STEM issue is encouraging. But whether the plans will be successful or sustainable remains to be seen; and every passing year that U.S. students don’t improve their STEM involvement, the gap widens between other countries.
Sports to the Rescue?
The certainty with the current STEM issue is that it is complex and will take a lot of work to right the ship. While the plan that President Obama created is a strong start, there are definitely many more ways to help raise awareness about the STEM problems; and get more students interested in science, technology, engineering, and math at an early age.
At SportTechie, we think sports can play a major role with the STEM situation.
We are pleased to introduce our new #SportsInSTEM series, which will explore, demonstrate, and illuminate ways in which sports are being used to train and enlighten students of all ages about pursuing interests and careers in STEM fields.
As we consistently examine the intersection of sports and technology, we are excited to broaden our focus to try and help with this issue.
National Instruments Collaboration
To kick off our #SportsInSTEM Series, we are collaborating with National Instruments (NI), a supplier of tools that accelerate productivity, innovation, and discovery to meet not only grand, but also daily engineering challenges in an increasingly complex world. NI shares our belief that sports can get more students interested in STEM disciplines. They believe that the best way to get the attention of students is to utilize things that they care about–their smartphone or their favorite sports team–to get their attention.
What Does This Look like?
Well, for example, rather than illustrating the concept of fatigue due to repetitive loading by bending a paper clip back and forth, talk instead about how LeBron James’ legs are breaking down after jumping up and down for 48 minutes. Or try teaching 11th graders relative speeds and acceleration by observing their track team’s 100-meter dash rather than demonstrating these concepts with static lines on a chalkboard. If you want to convince more students to participate or stay in STEM programs, introduce them to interesting, fun applications, like sports, and see how they respond.
It’s not rocket science—it’s sports science.
Technology companies, like NI, who are passionate about empowering the next generation of engineers and scientists, can play a major role in battling the STEM situation by giving students access to the same hardware and software tools that engineers working in industry use to design systems. Everything from smartphones, to medical devices, to airplanes are built and tested using the tools that NI produces. For the last few years, the company has been putting these same engineering tools into the hands of graduating students at universities around America, with the hopes that they can become familiar with them before they even leave school. With this approach, the graduating students are prepared to make an impact in their new STEM careers from day one. This helps students actually “do engineering” before graduating.
The next several posts of our #SportsInSTEM Series will introduce sports-related projects from engineering students around the country who used NI’s LabVIEW Software. With these projects, students built creative and original sports tech products that illustrate how sports played a major role in helping to train them as young engineers.
It is our goal to highlight the accomplishments of these students who are pursuing careers in STEM fields; and show how applying their STEM training to sports continues to be both fun and beneficial.
Smart Swimming Platform Helps Students Make a Splash in STEM Careers
Over the past couple of years, Sam Strickling, LabVIEW Product Marketing Manager for National Instruments, has worked with students at several universities across the nation to develop engineering projects that demonstrate sports science concepts. One of his earliest and most popular examples of these student-led sports engineering projects was a swimming study from 2011 done with six mechanical engineering students from the University of Texas.
Using National Instruments’ software, vision hardware, a Wii Balance Board, and a host of other sensors, the students were challenged to design and build a training platform that swimmers could use to measure and analyze their reaction speeds and body positioning as they entered the water. The video below shows how 18 months and two six-student groups later, the “Smart Start Swimming Platform” was developed. It is currently being evaluated for use by the United States Olympic Committee and all twelve students received engineering jobs upon graduating.
Since this swimming tech project, Strickling has gone on to continue this sports and STEM work with other groups of undergraduate engineering students: “Since the project at UT, I have gone on to sponsor more than 20 teams and over 100 students in sports technology projects and professors across the country have quickly realized their effectiveness. Professors and students now have more interest in projects like my ‘Qualitative Free-Throw Analysis’ than some of the more traditional academic offerings. The tools, experience, and knowledge these students possess is something that will help them in whatever ventures they pursue in the future. They understand engineering because it was presented to them in a digestible way they can relate to–through sports.”