EAT Keynote Prepares Kids For 21st Century Careers
“Man, that guy’s on fire,” said one attendee watching from the back of the room as Dr. Robert Panoff stepped off the stage.
Panoff, whose infectious zeal made his presentation one of the highlights of last month’s Engaging America’s Talent Conference, is the President and Executive Director of Shodor Education Foundation, Inc.
During a brief sit down over lunch, he explained that, while his organization has a classroom element, the environment is anything but traditional. Panoff’s teaching model centers on Shodor Interactive, a website that touts over one hundred interactive applications dedicated to “the creation, collection, evaluation, and dissemination of java-based courseware for middle school mathematics explorations.”
What does that mean exactly?
It means kids who learn from Shodor are getting excited about careers in math and science.
And, according to Panoff, the results have been dramatic. “90% of the kids who graduate from the program go into the specific field they’ve been training for.” he said. “That number jumps to 100% when you talk about them using other tools they learned at Shodor.”
The kids are benefiting from an extensive curriculum that is preparing them for work in the professional world, pulling from a course catalog that includes Html, Java and Photoshop, as well as project management and team-building exercises.
Perhaps most impressive, many of Shodor’s most popular applications have been developed by the students themselves. It’s no wonder that many of the graduates go on to successful careers in biology, chemistry and medicine.
“Somewhere in the area of 70% to 80% are intending to go into a field that they call math and science,” said Panoff. “But when you expand the realm of choices to include careers that the kids don’t necessarily think of as math or science related, fields like technology, engineering, programming, or system administration, the percentage jumps even higher.”
What impact does this have on states like North Carolina, where Shodor is housed? For one, it means providing a workforce that is prepared with 21st century skills, matching graduates with high-tech, high-paying jobs that industry demands. It also impacts the economy through job creation and innovation.
“We have a number of kids who are running companies that are based on ideas they came up with when they were students at Shodor,” Panoff explained. “Many of them start web-based companies. Some create applications that are truly unique.”
Panoff reflected on one graduate-run business called Voice Threads. The company offers a technology for annotation and transcription where users can attach comments or even text messages to a specific section of audio or video content.
And if they don’t start their own business, students go on to create their Shodor-inspired innovations in companies where they become employed, companies like IBM, SAS, and North Carolina’s Red Hat. And Panoff has worked hard to make sure Shodor evolves according to the needs of industry. The key, he said, is to instill a combination of problem solving skills and an ability to adapt to changing technologies. “We talk to our partners in industry and they tell us they want the kids to know two programming languages and two operating systems. When we ask which ones, they tell us they don’t care. They just want the kids to know there’s more than one way to solve a problem.” This input has proven valuable once taught in the classroom. “We warn the kids that things may be different in the work world; that by the time they get there, the tools will have most likely changed, so they’ll have to change with them. We try to instill the idea that to be successful, they must be lifelong learners.” |
And the kids appear to be getting the message.
“They’re proactive about it,” Panoff said. “Often, they discover problems before we do. We’ve had students that wrote programs in Java during high school who, once they’re in college, realize they have to go back and rewrite the code because the technology has changed. To modern companies, those are the kind of valuable employees they’re looking for.”
From a cultural perspective Panoff sees Shodor as more than just a tool to prepare students, but an organization that inspires the idea of giving back.
“It’s the attitude of the kids that they’re there to learn. And our goal is to get them to want to be contributors, to create a culture where it’s not just about learning things on their own, but sharing it with the faculty and passing it down to the students that come after them.”
Ultimately, though, Panoff said it’s about the joy of the process. “We’re having fun together. The kids are learning, and they keep us learning too.”
