Thank you Andy.


Talking personally, I have never been able to get enthusiastic about technolgy unless I know what it's trying to achieve.  Not particularly technology, but I was very pleased with myself recently when I took apart a pull cord fan switch (the old type).  I put in a new pull cord - it was very tricky, but now everytime I turn it on or off, I get a great sense of satisfaction.  I am aware this is very small in the bigger picture but I would always have been motivated along the solving of problems angle.


I totally agree that different approaches are required for different learning type personalities and this is why the teacher in a classroom will use many different teaching methods to teach the same topic.


P.S - I loved Thunderbirds too! :)

SImilarly the other day when I mended the amplifier I use in the kitchen to drive some speakers on the TV there - it only worked if you hit it, so I took it apart, found the cracked PCB track (having downloaded a circuit diagram and traced the signal), and soldered a link across it. I was thinking at the time that my degree in electronics, 18 month traineeship with the BBC, and subsequent 9 years developing very high end recording studio equipment all paid off in stopping my wife getting frustrated at keeping having to hit this thing!


One of the favourite school projects I've ever developed was one where we got a roomful of school teams, gave them a circuit I'd developed and a pile of "stuff", and asked them to - in a day- develop a system that would allow disabled children to play music. The circuit board converted switch or voltage intputs into MIDI (electronic keyboard control) data, and the pile of stuff included different types of switches, pressure sensors, slide and rotary pots, proximity detectors etc. The teachers were hugely impressed about how all the kids there (year 10/11 from memory) absolutely threw themselves into it and came up with some fantastic ideas. What helped hugely was that I got some speakers from a local charity to talk to the students beforehand about what sort of disabilites they had to cope with, and how it freed the people they worked with to be able to play music with others. If only we'd had time to take it to the next stage and find a way that the students could somehow have seen their ideas put into practice...


Cheers,


Andy

Andy and Hedy,

I have given this some thought and come to the conclusion that there needs to be a balance. There needs to be an emphasis on using the technology to solve problems, but if you don't understand the technology, how can you make best use of it in your solution. I take great delight in solving problems and puzzles (anything from crosswords up), and the greatest satisfaction is in developing an elegant solution to efficiently solve a problem. To achieve this there is a need to both understand the problem and the technology of your solution.

Regards,

Alasdair (another Thunderbirds fan)

Oh I absolutely 100% agree, I had that thought mulling over in my head as I wrote my original post. In the past I've helped GCSE & BTEC D&T students with their projects, where they've chosen their own projects, and I've seen them get very frustrated when they have a brilliant idea of a problem to solve, but don't have the "know-how" to do it. I'm really thinking that it's a case sometimes of shifting the emphasis of why we're introducing STEM, without necessarily changing too much about how we introduce it. And somehow getting over the idea - and confidence - that you can learn how to solve a problem once you've decided to solve it.


It's interesting that I find this much easier in the 9-11 year old age group, they can be great fun to work with as they pick up the "what's the problem we're trying to solve" very quickly and tend to be very happy to simply experiment with the technology until they solve it. There's something about teenage years (or secondary education) that seems to loose that impetus of experimental and investigative problem solving.


I half remember some research a few years back about there being two types of people that went into medicine, those who were fascinated by how the human body worked, and those who wanted to make people better. It was suggested that the recruitment of doctors had very much focused on the former, whereas actually the latter made much better doctors. But actually I suspect the medical profession as a whole needs both types, it's just that the first type should be kept well away from stressed patients! (There's an interesting, and well documented, issue regarding surgeons who get addicted to surgery for its own sake - and of course we see the same thing with engineers who get addicted to adding more and more features to their designs!)


Meanwhile, why did Brains never redesign the magnetic grabs on Thunderbird Two to stop them dropping things? Even if each grab was at the limit of its power he could have added more of them. (This always bothered me as a 6 year old.) Still, he did do pretty well to single handedly design and build all those machines by the age of 25  It is implied that Tintin helped.


Cheers, Andy

In that case it looks as if we are fully in agreement.

On the question of Brains, I thing the answer is he was too busy adding more and more features to his designs to have time to go back and make a change which would have just resulted in Virgil trying to lift even heavier loads.

Alasdair

Many thanks for explaining that - it's put an end to 50 years of worrying about it 

This is an incredibly interesting conversation. Thanks for creating it Andy. Like you I was also a Sinclair child ( the next generation will be the micro:bit kids I suppose  and we will probaly have our first 16 year old billionaire in the next two years! ).


​Personally I think we perhaps concentrate too much on the technology and its understanding, as its our natural disposition to do so:  While we may understand it, we still do not effectively communicate its importance to the public and so it becomes undervalued and totally misinterpreted by media. So I think the soft skills are one area STEM also needs to cover.


I think STEM is so encompassing and yet it is so very limiting in that we are not addressing or acknowledging that there are many avenues within engineering that allow very different creative thinking processes, from marketing, design, business practice etc. So while I embrace the purpose of STEM activities wholeheartedly,  we should learn the techniques of better identifying the problems to solve, communicating how we intend to solve them and then apply STEM and other practices to develop business opportunities.  


I am going to be very controversial here  and I expect some kickback and please note this in no way decries the amazing efforts of teachers, lecturers and professors. I think STEM is potentially a 1990's approach to a very different world of science and engineering. It's purpose was to enthuse the young to fill companies with valuable trained scientists and engineers and while it no doubt achieved its aims somewhat, I regularly see great dissapoinment from younger engineers who get tasked with lacklustre or mediocre projects and yet have the capability to do so much more for society; their very creative essence being snuffed out in the first beginnings. We really should be concentrating on creating a new 21st Century breed of 'Entrepreneur-Engineer' that is not reliant on big business and STEM should be the catalyst that ignites that passion, identifies those talents and brings them together to become a much more valuable asset for the country.   


BTW, loved Thunderbirds and I know that even some of my colleague engineers who had worked at British Aerospace had had heated debates of the forward swept wing concept of Thunderbird 2; thereby indicating the impact Gerry Anderson had on a whole generation!  But I was really a Joe 90 fan, BIGRAT and what was the pre-cursor to Google glass, and which eerily appeared at about the same time period the series was supposed to portray ( ok more controversy... I know).

I also wonder how much of the STEM in early years education really covers anything of much value.  We get a sheet at the start of each session that has 'STEM - topic related activities'.  This does not tell you much, as a parent, what will be covered and in what depth.

Technology is becoming necessary in all aspects of our lives, it can have many positive and negative effects but it is down to us to limit the negative and finds ways to boost the positive. We are now very reliant on technology and if it was to be taken away for any given reason we would be very lost.


Technology affects the way individuals communicate, learn, and think. It helps society and determines how people interact with each other on a daily basis. ... It's made learning more interactive and collaborative, this helps people better engage with the material that they are learning and have trouble with.

When technology is integrated into lessons in ways that are aligned with good in-person teaching pedagogy, learning can be better than without technology. ... Technology for learning, when deployed to all students, ensures that no student experiences a “21st-century skills and opportunity” gap.experiences a “21st-century skills and opportunity” gap.


So I'm fully support for STEM Education and for future technology.