Published in the Independence Daily Reporter April 2019

Today’s guest columnist is Joanne Smith, owner of FAB Creative Services

Planning is underway for our second annual “No Limitations” summer camp for middle school girls!

OK, that’s not the real name of the camp, but it’s the real mission.

The Verizon Innovative Learning Summer STEM Camp for girls entering 6th through 8th grade is an experience like none other in the area – or even in the state. Independence Community College is one of 16 community colleges across the United States (the next closest is in Nebraska) selected in 2018 by the Verizon Foundation to participate in the grant-funded STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) education program for girls. The objective? To narrow the gender gap when it comes to interest, education and careers in STEM and help both girls and boys in under-resourced areas access advanced technology and curriculum.

To that end, Verizon has committed more than $400 million since 2012 to support STEM programming for middle school age youth in under-represented populations and rural areas. The girls’ STEM program is in its second year in Independence, operating under the umbrella of Independence Community College and facilitated by Fab Lab ICC. In 2018, we hosted our first three-week summer camp, with approximately 90 girls ages 9-15 participating from throughout southeast Kansas. Curriculum for the camp included Design Thinking (problem solving); 3D Modeling and Printing; Coding and Circuits; Virtual and Augmented Reality, and more. Each girl also participated in a final project, using the skills they learned at camp to develop a solution to a global, national, local or personal problem. We took field trips, entertained both in-person and virtual guest speakers, played games and sang karaoke!

And every bit of it was ABSOLUTELY FREE to the girls. The Verizon funding supplied everything needed for the camp, including technology, tools and equipment, teaching staff, food (So. Much. Food!) and transportation. And, as part of the funding package, camp has been followed by monthly Saturday workshops to keep the girls engaged throughout the school year. The workshops we’ve devised have included a variety of activities and lessons – everything from learning the chemistry behind personal hygiene to building haunted escape rooms – and we routinely see approximately 40 girls at the monthly events.

As you can guess from our solid attendance numbers and creative curriculum, we’re doing something unusual in the STEM program. We’re bringing together girls from all different backgrounds into a community of excited learners. Girls are finding new areas of interest in problem solving for their families, communities and world, using technology they’ve never touched before and pushing the boundaries of their own creativity. Moreover, they are making new friends, learning social skills and having FUN with subjects they may never really have enjoyed before. We teach them that there are no boundaries, no limitations to their potential. There are not “girl” professions and “boy” professions, there are just wide open possibilities.

If you’re teen or pre-teen girl has never had the opportunity to truly explore STEM beyond the school classroom, see the real-world application or learn how fun it can be, this is the chance of a lifetime. I promise we’re not a bunch of math geeks! Our instructors are hometown teachers at the elementary, middle school and college levels who take a strong personal interest in our girls, their success and their fulfillment at camp. Our goal is to make sure each girl gets as much reward from the experience as the effort she puts in.

The online application process for summer camp is now live, and at this point, we still have about 70 spots open. To apply, visit http://www.fablabicc.org and click on the link labeled VIL Girls STEM Summer Camp, and make sure to have your student handy. There is a place on the application for her to write, in her words, why she wants to attend STEM camp. (If you need more room than what’s provided, please email your student’s response to me at fabcreativeservices@gmail.com.) All successful applicants will be notified by May 31.

We hope to see your girl at summer camp!

About today’s guest columnist:

Joanne Smith is the owner of FAB Creative Services, a multi-specialty marketing company based in Independence. She works closely with Fab Lab ICC and Independence Community College to provide marketing support and direct the Verizon Innovative Learning Girls’ STEM Program, as well as the Women 4 Women initiative to expose adult women to entrepreneurial concepts and opportunities. She may be contacted at fabcreativeservices@gmail.com; or (620) 330-3006. More information is available at http://www.fabcreativeservices.com.

 

Jim Correll is the director of Fab Lab ICC at the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship on the campus of Independence Community College. He can be reached at (620) 252-5349, by email at jcorrell@indycc.edu or Twitter @jimcorrellks.

 

Published in the Independence Daily Reporter April 2019

When I was in the right age range, let’s just say a few years ago, I was a Cub Scout. We had pinewood derby competitions back then and the pinewood derby for today’s Cub Scouts is alive and well. The cars are fashioned by the Scouts from small square blocks of wood. The Scout shapes it like a car using various saw cuts, rasping and sanding, then wheels are attached after painting. The cars are raced by placing them on a downhill track, using gravity to see which one first reaches the finish line at the bottom.

My dad helped me make my cars for each of two or three years as I remember. He seemed to strike a good balance of helping me with the more difficult parts but leaving most of the work, and learning, to me. One year when “Batman” was popular on television I had a friend that wanted his pinewood car to be a Batmobile. His dad helped him but ended up doing nearly all the work while my friend watched. Eventually, my friend got bored watching and went off on some other activity while his dad finished transforming his car into the Batmobile which won a prize for “coolest” design. I learned a lot, my friend not so much. Such is the activity of making; you learn the most when you are doing not watching.

When we started doing youth Fab Lab “Boot Camps” in 2015, we felt like there weren’t enough of us to answer the young peoples’ questions quickly enough. We also found that many were afraid of failing, hesitant to try something new. We had to get them over that. What we found was that the scarcity of not having enough teachers to answer the questions instantly made some of the kids give up waiting and find their own answers, either through experimentation or Google or You Tube.

For the third year this year, we will partner with the Southeast Kansas Education Cooperative, i.e. Greenbush for our week-long boot camps. This allows us to have more sessions, each with up to 24 participants instead of capping it off at 12 as we did the first two years. Even with the two Greenbush teachers, the kids still don’t get their questions answered immediately. Some give up on us and figure things out on their own or use the Internet. All in all, this scarcity contributes to greater learning.

A few weeks ago we welcomed several home school families into the lab on Fridays to facilitate experiential Lab learning in conjunction with the parents’ lessons at home. We’re finding that some of the home school parents need to learn the same lessons about getting the most learning for youth from the Lab experience. Here are a few pointers we’ll be conveying to the home school parents.

• Let your student do most of the work. It’s ok for you to show them a few things, but they will learn the most by doing not watching you. Sometimes it’s difficult to watch them take so long to click the right buttons or do the right thing, but they are learning all the while.
• Don’t expect the projects, especially the first ones, to be perfect. The greatest learning comes from the process of making the project, not strictly the end result. You’ll notice, as have we, that the quality of the projects will increase dramatically over time.
• Demonstrate that it’s OK to go to Google or You Tube to find answers. While this kind of lookup may be “cheating” in some school activities, project-based learning moves into overdrive when you can get answers quickly by watching a how-to video for the task you need to learn.
• Start with simple projects that can be done quickly without a lot of frustration. That way, the building of creative confidence and start immediately and prepare the student for future challenges of more complex projects.
• Encourage your student to seek help from and offer help to other students. Like the Internet, this may be “cheating” in traditional school activities, in real life it is called collaboration and builds cohesive teams that can accomplish great things.
• Demonstrate with your student the art of cleaning up when finished and leaving the surroundings in better condition than when they arrived.

Even though I’ve targeted this piece to be about youth in the Lab, these lessons learned really apply to all of us. We all have a young, eager student in us waiting to come to the Lab and experience the joy of learning by making.

 

Jim Correll is the director of Fab Lab ICC at the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship on the campus of Independence Community College. He can be reached at (620) 252-5349, by email at jcorrell@indycc.edu or Twitter @jimcorrellks.

 

Published in the Independence Daily Reporter April 2019

Artificial intelligence (AI) is coming, and we can’t stop it. The genie is out of to bottle. Artificial intelligence is one of those terms along its related concepts that are broad and hard to define. For today, we’ll use this as the example of AI; you search for some item on eBay, Amazon or even more broadly in Google and next thing you know you’re seeing ads and receiving emails about that and related items everywhere you look. Artificial intelligence is being used to determine what you like and show you—and get you to buy–more of it.

In a news story on television the other day, a museum curator uses AI to show patrons only the kinds of art they like. Social media uses AI to determine what kind of content and even what kinds of thoughts and ideas you might like.

When I was growing up, I refused to eat beets, spinach and liver. My mother tried again and again over time to get me to try these foods, but to no avail. Had she been artificially intelligent, learning that I didn’t like these foods she would have given up and filtered them out. Eventually I discovered that I like beets and spinach; but liver, never. She taught me that it’s good to try new foods and ideas and that learning and understanding, indeed, innovation, comes from a diverse collection of experiences.

In his book “Where Good Ideas Come From” Steven Johnson explores some of the greatest innovations such as the printing press, the pencil, the flush toilet, the battery and others with the stories of how they came about. Most didn’t come about because a flash of brilliance came into someone’s head. They came about as a disjointed collection of ideas in someone’s head, some new, some floating around for years, came together in a new and different way to form a great new idea.

How are great new ideas going to come from our minds if AI only shows us the thoughts, ideas and products that we think we like? How will we ever discover that we like new and different things if we’re never shown new and different things? Isn’t this what’s already wrong with political and other kinds of public discourse today? We get used to only liking what we like and thinking about what we like and we’re not open to anyone else’s views? Won’t public debate, which should lead to better decisions, only continue to erode if we allow AI to increasingly filter out what it thinks we don’t like?

While we can’t stop AI from evolving in our world, we can be aware of what it is doing (let alone the fact the AI can be influenced by commercial interest trying to get us to buy stuff) and work extra hard to experience a wide variety of ideas, thoughts, knowledge and even food. We can also make our youth aware of AI and that we have to work to be independent, critical thinkers even as AI is trying to filter our experiences.

My mother wasn’t artificially intelligent, she was genuinely intelligent. I’m not sure she realized just how intelligent she was. She was a farm mom in southwest Kansas doing the best she could to raise a young boy to be curious about how the world works. She did this by introducing me to lots of different experiences, and food, while trying to teach me to be respectful of and helpful to others. If we really want artificial intelligence to be good, we’ll make it intelligent enough to do the same instead of merely trying to filter all the stuff in our lives that we don’t like.

 

Jim Correll is the director of Fab Lab ICC at the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship on the campus of Independence Community College. He can be reached at (620) 252-5349, by email at jcorrell@indycc.edu or Twitter @jimcorrellks.

 

Published in the Independence Daily Reporter April 2019

For the second time in just over a year, local entrepreneur Joanne Smith (Fab Creative Services) and I recently returned from an entrepreneurial policy advocacy trip to Washington, DC sponsored by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation (EMKF) in Kansas City, Missouri.

Our relationship with EMKF goes back to October 2013 when I met Kauffman’s then head of entrepreneurship, Thom Ruhe, by chance in a hotel restaurant in Orlando, Florida. The conversations with him that night led to Kauffman supporting the initial creation of Fab Lab ICC with a $50,000 matching grant that we matched with private donations.

EMKF is no small concern. With assets of around $2 billion, it is one of the world’s largest organizations dedicated to furthering entrepreneurship around the globe. Ewing Marion Kauffman came back from the Navy in World War II and got a sales job with a pharmaceutical company. He was really good with people and at building relationships. So good that within a couple of years, he made more money from his sales commissions than did the president of the company. So, the president didn’t like that and instead of congratulating him on helping make the company successful, the president cut his territory in half. Mr. Kauffman still made more than the president and he tried to cut his territory again. With $5,000, Ewing Marion Kauffman started Marion Laboratories and most of his customers followed him to the new venture. He used his middle name in an attempt to make it appear to be more than just a one-man show. When the company merged in 1989 with Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals to form Marion Merrell Dow the deal made more than 300 millionaires.

Kauffman established the EMKF in the mid-1960s. He wanted his foundation to be innovative – to fundamentally change people’s lives, making entrepreneurship and training available to people all over the globe.

Even though Ruhe left the Foundation in 2014, our relationship with EMKF continues to grow. Two years ago, we applied for a grant in what was called the Kauffman Inclusion initiative. Our purpose was to lower barriers to women and making entrepreneurship and small business ownership more readily available. We’re in the middle of our 2-year “Women 4 Women” (W4W) program with Independence entrepreneur Joanne Smith as the manager of the initiative.

In a highly competitive process, our W4W application was selected as one of 21grantees out of more than 700 applications from around the United States. We later found out that we were also from one of the smallest communities. Chattanooga, Tennessee was the next smallest and they others ranged all the way up to Baltimore, Los Angles and New York.

In addition to working directly to help entrepreneurs and small business owners, EMKF is interested in educating and advocating for entrepreneurship among the legislators and policy makers in the US government and around the country. For the second year they have sponsored entrepreneurship advocates (that would be me) and their representative entrepreneurs (Joanne Smith) to go to Washington DC to meet with legislators and policy makers to demonstrate the importance of entrepreneurship and small business ownership to these elected officials who determine our policies.

It’s an important message. Erroneously, our society and media lead us to believe that businesses are created by flamboyant entrepreneurs with a lot of money and big venture capital to invest in their start-ups. Also, that in order to be a successful entrepreneur you have to know venture capitalists and have business and MBA degrees from the big universities, if Harvard, so much so the better. The fact is that ninety-eight percent of businesses are started by ordinary people with less than $10,000 to spent on start-up.

Through W4W and Growth Accelerator, we are working to support this kind of start-up and growth activity with the entrepreneurial mindset training and business coaching we offer at Fab Lab ICC. We act like our future depends on it because it does. The key to economic growth in the future not only in the United States, but all over the world, is entrepreneurial activity by ordinary individuals learning to do extraordinary things.

 

Jim Correll is the director of Fab Lab ICC at the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship on the campus of Independence Community College. He can be reached at (620) 252-5349, by email at jcorrell@indycc.edu or Twitter @jimcorrellks.