I have seen first hand how robots get kids interested in STEM. Checkout roborave.org/ as a good example. Robots are this generation's "drug vector of choice" into STEM. You gotta get them hooked on engineering and science. Roborave starts at 4th grade through college. One of the cool things is it's truly international. It got so big, they had to branch South America off as a completely separate entity.
Different competitions need different resources. Roborave teams might spend $200 on a robot. The big ones can be fairly costly. The tag line is "Today's play, tomorrow's pay"
The big hook is robots are fun. Robots have a unique characteristic: there are a lot of problems that each take 3..5 days to solve. This gives the kids a lot of problems - increases their problem-solving skills, and they keep at it. These two aspects are critical, because it keeps them going.
A friend is a teacher of robotics at the Jr High and Sr High level. He enters his kids in 5..6 competitions per year. The kids are so into it he has to go to the robotics lab at midnight every day and tell the kids to GO HOME.
You mentioned open source projects. Google Summer Of Code (GSoC) is exactly that. An applicant submits a proposal to fix some part of open source projects. The proposals must be realistic - the work is done over a summer. The winners are pairs with mentors in industry - Google puts up $6K for a successful project. My son did it one summer and had a blast. It gave him a real taste of the real world. His mentor was very impressed.
The problem with GSoC is the number of slots. It is world-wide, but the USA has 125 slots.
Would I like to see High school kids participate in something like that? Yes. Make it a class in the last period, so they are not forced to stop at the end of the class. The biggest problem I can see is finding teachers that are tech-savvy enough for it. A robot is fairly constrained. Finding holes in open-source code && aiding the students in fixing them is a more focused skill set. Not impossible, just harder. Might need to find retired engineers (who have been programming for decades) to come in as mentors.
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Yeah, I think you've unintentionally found the problem: robots get people interested in STEM and then all those bright, excited people get to university and don't learn the right things to be successful in industry when they graduate (and probably waste a lot of time in completely useless classes along the way).
My college CS program (late 70's) gave me the useful tools for learning new things. The most useful are OS theory, data structures, and state machines. It took being in industry to learn the basics of systems engineering (SE) . So I basically agree with you. The basic problem is time. The entire CS program would need to be engineered around making SE an integral part of the program. Meaning every class with a project starts with the SE process and carries it through the entire project, and the grades also depends on the SE process. Given what I know of academic departments, this is non trivial.
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I have seen first hand how robots get kids interested in STEM. Checkout roborave.org/ as a good example. Robots are this generation's "drug vector of choice" into STEM. You gotta get them hooked on engineering and science. Roborave starts at 4th grade through college. One of the cool things is it's truly international. It got so big, they had to branch South America off as a completely separate entity.
Different competitions need different resources. Roborave teams might spend $200 on a robot. The big ones can be fairly costly. The tag line is "Today's play, tomorrow's pay"
The big hook is robots are fun. Robots have a unique characteristic: there are a lot of problems that each take 3..5 days to solve. This gives the kids a lot of problems - increases their problem-solving skills, and they keep at it. These two aspects are critical, because it keeps them going.
A friend is a teacher of robotics at the Jr High and Sr High level. He enters his kids in 5..6 competitions per year. The kids are so into it he has to go to the robotics lab at midnight every day and tell the kids to GO HOME.
You mentioned open source projects. Google Summer Of Code (GSoC) is exactly that. An applicant submits a proposal to fix some part of open source projects. The proposals must be realistic - the work is done over a summer. The winners are pairs with mentors in industry - Google puts up $6K for a successful project. My son did it one summer and had a blast. It gave him a real taste of the real world. His mentor was very impressed.
The problem with GSoC is the number of slots. It is world-wide, but the USA has 125 slots.
Would I like to see High school kids participate in something like that? Yes. Make it a class in the last period, so they are not forced to stop at the end of the class. The biggest problem I can see is finding teachers that are tech-savvy enough for it. A robot is fairly constrained. Finding holes in open-source code && aiding the students in fixing them is a more focused skill set. Not impossible, just harder. Might need to find retired engineers (who have been programming for decades) to come in as mentors.
Yeah, I think you've unintentionally found the problem: robots get people interested in STEM and then all those bright, excited people get to university and don't learn the right things to be successful in industry when they graduate (and probably waste a lot of time in completely useless classes along the way).
My college CS program (late 70's) gave me the useful tools for learning new things. The most useful are OS theory, data structures, and state machines. It took being in industry to learn the basics of systems engineering (SE) . So I basically agree with you. The basic problem is time. The entire CS program would need to be engineered around making SE an integral part of the program. Meaning every class with a project starts with the SE process and carries it through the entire project, and the grades also depends on the SE process. Given what I know of academic departments, this is non trivial.