END NOTE More than a Numbers Game Don't just give students basic chunks of
knowledge. They need greater motivation. By Tom Lee R tive, creative
engineering skills. Done right, ECENTLY I HAD THE PLEA the teaching of
such skills also makes the sure of being a judge at the national program
more vibrant and motivational. FIRST For Inspiration and Recog- Today's
schools can draw from an un- nition of Science and Technology robotics
precedented range of tools and resources: competition in Atlanta. It casts
the science new software technologies that streamline of robotics into a
team sport and encourages knowledge delivery and remove archaic high
schoolers to practice and learn about techniques from the curriculum;
direct real science and engineering. Some 350 collaboration with working
scientists and schools from around the world converged engineers;
competitions such as FIRST, to pit their home-built robots against each
American Solar Challenge, and the Put- other in a Jetson-esque basketball
game. nam Mathematical Competition; and many There I was in the mighty
Georgia Dome other known techniques that establish real surrounded by
thousands of our brightest context and relevance to engineering. kids
scrambling to reprogram a control al- When other teams have 10 times your
gorithm or calibrate one thing or another. Simply getting kids to
population, you have no choice but to focus Later, we heard U.S.
Department of the engineering lecture on the quality of your people in
addition to Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez and the quantity. Simply
getting the kids to the Google founder Sergey Brin preaching on hall is
not enough. engineering lecture hall is not enough. science and math
education. I'm sure what Four hundred years ago, Gauss taught they had to
say was important, but they calculus and differential equations at the
Much of it is numbers driven. Simple were drowned out by the kids. Not in
an University of G
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of University Business - July 2006