A team of mechanical and electrical engineering faculty
at South Dakota Mines are in the running for the National Science Foundation (NSF)
Visionary Interdisciplinary Teams Advancing Learning, (VITAL) Prize. The Mines team
is developing a new hands-on learning program for high school students in science,
technology, engineering and math (STEM). The project will be fully NSF funded
if the team continues to be successful in the semi-final, and final rounds of the competitive
process.
Prasoon Diwakar, Ph.D., an assistant professor of
mechanical engineering at Mines, is leading the effort. He joined collaborators
to install a fully functional scientific lab in the Frost Science Museum and
the Ransom Everglades High School, both in Miami, Fla. These labs allow
students to take on real-world science projects and problems they want to
tackle in their own communities.
“We have noticed one of the key things left out of
traditional STEM education is hands-on real-world experiential learning. One
thing kids often ask is, ‘Why should we learn math?’ This is part of what we
are tackling with our program,” says Diwakar.
Diwakar has teamed up with his spouse Neha Choudhary,
who is an instructor of electrical engineering at Mines, two ed-tech entrepreneurs
in Miami, Ted Caplow and Nathalie Manzano, and two K-12 educators from Ransom
Everglades High School in Florida, Heather Marshall and Kristine Stump. Diwakar
started the project before his move to South Dakota Mines and has continued his
work as a university faculty member.
In Miami, the high school students in the program devised
their own research projects to test fresh and ocean water quality in their surrounding
community using cutting-edge scientific equipment, like a laser induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) instrument installed in a lab at
their school.
“The students are using laser spectroscopy, novel
sampling approaches and machine learning to process the data they gathered. When
they learn about the tools they have and the potential for what they can do
with a laboratory like this, they get excited about doing the research, and
they quickly engage in the effort to help solve real-world problems right in
their own backyards,” says Diwakar.
Diwakar began the work in high school STEM education
in 2016, and he hopes to bring the same program to Rapid City for both middle
and high school students. Mines is now
in the top 54 multidisciplinary teams who are competing for top spots in the NSF VITAL
Prize Challenge. During the Semi-Final Round, teams and their educator partners will have approximately three months to make significant progress toward the design and feasibility of an early working prototype. A judging panel of field leading experts across educational research, practice and technology will review and select a subset of the teams to participate in the Final Round.
“My plan is to grow this further because I have
personally seen the positive results of this program on students. Between 2016
and 2023, several of the high school students in this program have graduated
and gone on to prestigious universities and careers in STEM,” says Diwakar.
For Diwakar, programs like this are of critical
importance if the United States wants to remain at the forefront of technology
development on the world stage. He says other nations are catching up or
surpassing the US, and it’s important for America to make innovative changes in
STEM education to keep up.
“If you look at the data, the United States is no
longer the top nation in the world with the most patents annually; other
countries are now beating us. This shows our innovation is lagging on the world
stage. Of the top countries in the world, the US students
rank 25nd in math proficiency,” he says. “These numbers show
why it’s so important we invest in young people today with new programs like
this.”
The $6 million, multiphase challenge supports teams developing novel learning technologies with entrepreneurial training, customer discovery support, seed funding and mentorship to build K-12 learning innovations for adoption nationwide. The VITAL Prize Challenge is made possible through a partnership between NSF and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Schmidt Futures and the Walton Family Foundation and administered by the global education nonprofit Digital Promise.