Project Description
Cuyahoga Community College respectfully requests support from the National Science Foundation for the Robotics Corridor Collaborative, an initiative enhancing educational opportunities for youth in the high-technology field of robotics that is transforming the regional economy from the Rust Belt into the Robotics Corridor.
Introduction of Partners:
Cuyahoga Community College’s Youth Technology Academy (YTA) is a program designed to prepare in-school youth for careers in engineering and technology by providing seven major activities that give students a broad array of educational experiences:
- enrollment in Cuyahoga Community College’s college engineering/technology/manufacturing courses through Post-Secondary Enrollment Options (PSEOP) that allows students to bank college credit toward a certificate or degree while they are still in high school;
- training in soft-skills through seminars and competitions that prepare students to function in the workforce;
- participation in robotics tournaments (such as FIRST and VEX) that provide opportunities for students to apply knowledge and skills learned in the classroom in a real-life hands-on situation;
- training and mentorship by technicians and engineers from industrial partners who teach by example;
- tutoring on an as-needed basis to help students maintain their grades;
- participation in job-shadowing and paid internship experiences that expose students to the real workplace situation; and
- involvement in mentoring younger students in robotics camps that provides students to review, organize, and present their knowledge and skill sets to others
Cuyahoga Community College, also known as Tri-C, opened in 1963 as the first community college in Ohio and is now not only the largest college in Greater Cleveland but also the largest community college in Ohio, serving more than 55,000 credit and non-credit students each year and offering more than 70 programs for Associate Degrees and one-year certificates. Tri-C also offers many programs for continuing education and for business, industry, and workforce development.
The College is a leader in public education, academic innovation, cultural enrichment, and preparation of the workforce to fill the jobs of today and tomorrow. Tri-C’s is the largest PSEOP (Post-Secondary Enrollment Options) program in the state, with more than 11,000 students participating. Over 40 percent of Tri-C’s graduates continue their education at four-year institutions and more than 85 percent of its graduates continue to live in Northeast Ohio, providing a pool of skilled workers for area employers.
Tri-C is a member of the prestigious League for Innovation in the Community College, a consortium of the 20 most innovative two-year colleges in the nation.
Carnegie-Mellon University’s Robotics Institute (RI) is the nation’s foremost research and technology development organization in agile robotics. The RI also offers PhD and Master’s Degree programs in robotics. In addition, the RI has pioneered the development of agile robotics education curriculum in various forms through its Robotics Academy (RA) at lower levels, from junior high school all the way up to bachelor’s programs. The RA markets and distributes its highly regarded educational materials, trains hundreds of teachers per year both online and face-to-face, designs software that helps teachers facilitate Robotic Camps for children across the United States, hosts middle- and high-school robotics competitions, actively supports high-school robotics teams in national competitions such as FIRST and BotBall, and otherwise champions and supports scores of other agile robotics educational programs. RA curriculum and software is being used by over 3000 middle and high schools across the United States.
California University of Pennsylvania (CUP), with the third largest Technology Education program in the United States, has secured significant funding through the DOD and is partnering with the RA to develop technician-level training materials to grow the Southwestern Pennsylvania regional robotic and automation workforce. One of the stipulations to CUP’s winning the training materials development award was that it partner with CMU on design and implementation of the new curriculum. The new curriculum has a different focus than previously developed RA materials, and the technical level of this material is much higher than that of previous work. It puts more emphasis on the development of skills that will be used in industry than did previous RA work that involved the use of robots to demonstrate academic concepts. The curriculum places a higher emphasis on troubleshooting, wiring, using meters, building circuits, designing and building sensors, etc. The CMU/CUP team began by conducting a DACUM to gather feedback from robotic and manufacturing companies regionally. Industry feedback (included in the Appendix of this Proposal) told the developers that it is important for the curriculum not only to develop skills but also to develop an “engineering methodology” in future workers that will give them skills to attack a problem when they don’t know the answer. The CMU/CUP team has a mandate to recruit Western Pennsylvania schools to use this curriculum in order to grow a technologically literate regional workforce in Western Pennsylvania. The RC project proposed here provides an opportunity for Northeast Ohio to grow its own technologically literate regional workforce through the CMU/CUP partnership with Tri-C that offers the same CMU/CUP coursework to CMSD and in turn to other Northeast Ohio school systems.
CUP is interested in developing the nation’s first-ever two-tier associates and undergraduate degree programs in robotics engineering technology. This program will be targeted at educating a next-generation of agile robotics technicians and application engineers that will be needed to meet the growing workforce demand in this new and emerging sector of the robotics industry. Specifically, this program is expected to meet the future demand for such technicians and engineers for the defense industry in Southwestern Pennsylvania, including United Defense’s production facility in nearby Fayette County.
CUP also expects to offer a continuing education certificate program in robotics engineering technology for engineers and technicians with associate and bachelor degrees in mechanical, electrical, and computer engineering that work for regional companies and need to increase their knowledge and skills in agile robotics. CUP will partner with regional employers to offer the certificate training program on-site at employers’ facilities and/or via distance-learning technology. CUP expects to grow its degree and certificate education programs in robotics engineering technology over the next five years to a level where 50 – 100 students are enrolled. Longer term, CUP is also interested in developing a bachelor’s degree program in robotics engineering science. This set of courses is also being integrated into a CUP Technology Education teacher preparation program.
Cleveland Municipal School District (CMSD) isthe K-12 public education system that serves the city of Cleveland, Ohio. CMSD will provide the students and the teachers/Technology Ambassadors for the project in Year One. In Years Two and Three, the project will establish similar relationships with other Northeast Ohio school systems in order to begin the project’s expansion throughout the Northeast Ohio-Southwest Pennsylvania corridor. Please see A
Current Industry Advisors include Batelle, Jergens, NorTech, and Swagelok, and the project will continue developing industry relationships on an ongoing basis. These will provide invaluable input into both the professional development and the program improvement foci of this project. Please see letters of support and commitment in the Appendix for more information.
Other sources of significant support include the City of Cleveland, the office of Senator Mike Dewine, National Robotics Educators (California State University, Northridge), Youth Opportunities Unlimited (a YTA partner that provides soft-skills training to participating students),and Cleveland TechWorks (a partnership of Northeast Ohio K-12 educators, representatives from government workforce and economic development offices, civic and professional organizations, business and industry, and citizen volunteers exploring innovative ways to support the development of Northeast Ohio’s future technology workforce). Please see letters of support and commitment in the Appendix for more information.
Motivating Rationale:
The motivating rationale behind this project is Cleveland’s current economic decline. The decline is so severe that in 2003, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, Cleveland experienced the highest poverty rate among America's big cities, with nearly a third of its population and nearly one-half of its children living in poverty. In addition, the Cleveland Schools’ $1 million dollar deficit required 1,400 layoffs, which resulted in more students walking to school or taking public transportation, extracurricular programs being eliminated, and class sizes being increased by five to seven students (E. Reed, 2004).
Cleveland’s economic situation is largely blamed on the decline of manufacturing jobs in recent years. According to Northeast Ohio Campaign for American Manufacturing (NEOCAM, 2004), three million manufacturing jobs have been lost on a nationwide scale since 1998. Ohio’s share of the lost manufacturing jobs is close to a quarter million (NEOCAM, 2004). NEOCAM puts the significance of lost manufacturing jobs in perspective: A dollar of lost manufacturing production leads to another $1.50 in losses to the service sector. The loss of manufacturing payroll dollars has led to state and local budget crunches and cutbacks in public services and education. The loss of manufacturing capacity undermines our national defense and innovation capability (NEOCAM, 2004).
It is logical to expect that our schools will train a new generation of technicians who will be capable of revitalizing the manufacturing sector, but the schools are woefully inadequate. In the words of Bill Gates, "Training the workforce of tomorrow with the high schools of today is like trying to teach kids about today's computers on a 50-year-old mainframe. . . . Our high schools were designed 50 years ago to meet the needs of another age. Until we design schools to meet the needs of the 21st century, we will keep limiting - and even ruining - the lives of millions of Americans every year" (Gates). Bill Gates’s voice is not the only voice warning us that science and technology education is out of step with the needs of the 21st century and has to be revamped. The same warning is being echoed by many voices, all the way up to the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST).
PCAST Findings: In its report entitled Maintaining the Strength of our Science & Engineering Capabilities (2004), PCAST warns that our nation’s entire national innovation ecosystem is at risk, and therefore our competitive standing in the world market as well as our national security are at risk, since this innovation ecosystem is what produced the global economic leadership, the high standard of living, and the high level of national security this country enjoyed in the 20th century.
Because at the base of the innovation ecosystem lie science and technology, the PCAST report focuses on improving education in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) as one means to maintain our economic standing and our defense. PCAST’s report makes three recommendations that pertain to education as a first step in combating the threat the US faces: Improve the K-12 educational system by imposing more math & science instruction on the students; improve K-12 teacher preparation; and improve graduate and undergraduate STEM training and retention. This project responds to PCAST’s clarion call.
Robotics Corridor (RC) partners believe that a fourth recommendation should be added to PCAST’s list: The U.S. must aggressively market STEM, particularly engineering, to K-12 students, helping them to identify the significance of STEM in their lives and the relationship of STEM to their career paths. For this reason, the RC project is designed to motivate a larger number of students to enter the STEM pipeline and also to improve technician-level training, recognizing that traditional US education is not preparing students for innovation and discovery and is not preparing students with good “Habit of Mind.”
Habit of Mind: In the view of RC partners, developing good "Habit of Mind" has to be the mission of educators. Good "Habit of Mind" means having a disposition toward behaving intelligently when confronted with problems, the answers to which are not immediately known: dichotomies, dilemmas, enigmas, and uncertainties. It means getting into the habit of behaving intelligently when one DOESN'T know the answer. RC partners share the following beliefs:
- All students can and want to learn but need to have the right environment and motivators.
- This generation of American children must use all of their potential in order to compete.
- Preparing students to work in today's world means teaching them that the only thing constant is change, and to remain marketable they must become life-long learners.
- Technological literacy not only includes understanding computer hardware and software, but it also relies on three academic principles: knowledge about technology; ways of thinking about and acting on technology; and understanding the capabilities of technology.
- Teaching students engineering process and challenging them with appropriate level work will increase good "Habit of Mind" as it increases students' academic performance.
The Robotics Corridor project is designed to stimulate teaching that promotes good Habit of Mind.
If we look at the results of other nations’ educational systems, we will note that according to some sources China graduates 700,000 engineers per year (Colvin, 2005; Kanellos, 2002; Bialik, 2005), each trained in a specific area of engineering. Can the U.S. compete with this workforce? According to Bill Gates, the U.S. is graduating only one-sixth the engineers that China is graduating (Bialik, 2005; Mundy, 2005). And what about the U.S. defense system? By 2015, one third of our military vehicles will be operated either by remote control or in autonomous mode (Chang, 2005), and robotics and automation play key roles in the development of Future Combat Systems. Will American schools be capable of graduating enough skilled technical workers to sustain our national defense? It’s not in the interest of the US to entrust its national security to foreign technicians!
This project is motivated not only by national concerns but by regional concerns as well. It responds to the need for economic revitalization of the Northeast Ohio and Southwest Pennsylvania corridor, which has earned the nickname “Rust Belt.” With a well prepared high-tech workforce, the proposers foresee a re-emergence of this region as the economically viable powerhouse it once was, a transformation of this “Rust Belt” into the Robotics Corridor.
The three-year Robotics Corridor (RC) collaborative project will focus on the work of several predecessors: CMU’s exemplary Robotics Academy curriculum, CMU/CUP’s collaborative DOD-funded technician-level training program, National Robotics Educators’ ATE-funded curriculum, and their test bed -- the nationally known and award-winning Tri-C YTA program.
In Year One, the RC project will focus on two areas of study: (1) professional development for technology/STEM teachers and community-college faculty from Northeast Ohio and (2) the testing and integration of CMU/CUP technician training materials into technology education and community college classrooms. This effort will address Northeast Ohio regional technician, technologist, and engineering needs.
In Year One, the Tri-C/CMU team will conduct surveys designed to assess the ability of the curriculum to teach technicians, teachers, and faculty. The results of the assessment surveys will be shared with CMU/CUP enabling them to improve their content based on testing. Tri-C is the perfect partner for the CMU/CUP project, which is interested in national dissemination, because it is far enough away from CMU that much of the training will involve distance learning, but close enough for partners to get together for face-to-face meetings as needed.
In Year Two, CMU will recruit other community colleges to work with and will continue to build the corridor of robotic training partnerships with schools and industry from Northeast Ohio through Southwest Pennsylvania. The CMU/CUP/Tri-C team will continue to iteratively test RC training methodologies to improve the curriculum content. CMU is already disseminating its training materials nationally. As noted before, CMU/CUP’s curriculum is being used in over 3000 schools, and CMU RA holds a number-one ranking in Google when “Robotic Curriculum” is searched. In Year Three, CMU will offer national dissemination of its Train-the-Trainer approach to professional development, which this project demonstrates.
The starting point for the project will involve program improvement to the existing Tri-C YTA model, which recruits WIA-qualified low-income predominantly minority high-school students for engineering- and technology-related training. This award-winning program uses a multifaceted approach to teaching STEM to its stakeholders and provides them with key benefits: