We want to recruit soldiers who can come into the Army and be effective operators with the kit we will give them; they need to have a basic education in science and engineering. So it is incumbent on us to support our teachers and schools and encourage students to take these subjects.
Showing children that kit and the soldiers’ computers, the application, in a very real way, of electronics and electrical engineering, how it fits together with the math and physics and why taking those courses and understanding those principles is important – that is needed just for our future force, to recruit soldiers who can come in and work with the kit we give them.
But from a national perspective, as the world becomes more complex and technically oriented, if we are going to remain competitive, we need to have these scientists and engineers. That’s what we hear from industry, that we are not graduating American citizens with those kinds of degrees in numbers we need to remain competitive. So it is a huge national issue.
There are some real challenges out there, and we need to encourage our young people, all across the spectrum, to get involved with this. And there are challenges with the way the schools operate in terms of teaching and motivating students to take classes that are not that easy.
Is there anything the government is or should be doing to help military personnel leaving the service under downsizing become teachers, to encourage schools to take advantage of this new group of potential STEM educators, even if they don’t have education degrees?
Do you really need someone with an education degree teaching math or science or engineering, rather than taking someone with a master’s degree in chemistry or physics or math and give them a special training class on how to be an instructor, as we do at West Point, then put them in front of junior or high school students to provide real-life experience from the military and help encourage and mentor young people to pursue these degrees?
No, but it’s a great idea and something the Department of Education should look at. Do you really need someone with an education degree teaching math or science or engineering, rather than taking someone with a master’s degree in chemistry or physics or math and give them a special training class on how to be an instructor, as we do at West Point, then put them in front of junior or high school students to provide real-life experience from the military and help encourage and mentor young people to pursue these degrees? That may need a change in what we require of teachers to help us, as a country, get to where we need to go.
Does RDECOM have any efforts in place or planned, from internships to community outreach, to support the president’s goal of having 100,000 new STEM teachers in place by 2020?
We do a lot of that. We’re actually the executor for the Army’s STEM outreach program, run out of the DASA-R&T office. Each Army lab and RDEC brings in undergraduate and graduate students as interns, and there is tremendous outreach to all local schools, from grade schools through high school.
At Aberdeen [Proving Ground, Md.], we modified an entire building that had been a barracks into a STEM facility, where our scientists and engineers volunteer their time to bring in students and teachers to set up experiments and classrooms. The eCyber mission also is run from here, where we put out a challenge for children to use computers to do design projects; we judge those, and each June bring in teams and pick winners.
