Industry Educating Future Engineers

This week we welcome guest blogger Irek Kusmierczyk, PhD, Program Manager with WEtech Alliance.
  
What role can industry play in educating the next generation of engineers, IT professionals, skilled workers, innovators and entrepreneurs in Windsor and Essex?

That is a formidable question very few executives bother to ask themselves as they focus on the survival of their companies, perhaps unaware the long term survival of their industry depends on planting the seeds today for a workforce able to compete in a 21^st century knowledge economy.

This means STEM, as in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics.

According to Human Resources and Skills Development Canada (HRSDC), almost 75 per cent of new jobs in the next decade will be in high skill occupations, the kind requiring a STEM education.

In the United States, while only 5 percent of the U.S. workforce works directly in STEM fields, together they account for more than 50 percent of America’s economic growth.

During most of the 20^th century, one could say Windsor and Essex were winning the “low-end manufacturing” game, as the Big Three and the Machine Tool Die and Mold (MTDM) located in this region, bringing jobs and investment.  That game is now over and we must find a way to compete in the new high technology, high productivity game.

The problem is our region—and Canada in general—is not graduating enough scientists and engineers to fuel Canada’s knowledge economy and there is a danger we will get buried by emerging economies eager to steal our lunch.

For example, in Canada, less than 10 percent of all university degrees granted are in engineering-related fields.  In China, almost 40 percent of graduates are in those fields.

The key to unlocking our potential rests in industry stepping off the sidelines and getting involved in education, which is what the Canadian Council of Chief Executives concluded in a report published this year titled Competing in the 21^st Century Skills Race.

President Barack Obama, in his most recent State of the Union address, emphasized that message to industry, stating emphatically:

Tonight, I'm announcing a new challenge, to redesign America's high schools so they better equip graduates for the demands of a high-tech economy. And we'll reward schools that develop new partnerships with colleges and employers, and create classes that focus on science, technology, engineering and math, the skills today's employers are looking for to fill the jobs that are there right now and will be there in the future.

In Windsor and Essex, we have already taken the first bold steps in this direction, spearheaded by an organization called WEtech Alliance, which is not-for-profit that promotes the technology and innovation sector in Windsor Essex, one of fourteen so-called Regional Innovation Centres across Ontario.

WEtech is expanding the FIRST Robotics program into area high schools and grade schools.  FIRST stands for: For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology and it is a world-class, worldwide robotics competition that engages some 30,000 high school and 200,000 grade school students.  

High school teams of thirty students build man-sized robots that are tough enough to crash-and-bash in an arena against other robots, but nimble enough to shoot three-point shots, launch Frisbees into scoring chutes and climb ten-foot steel pyramids.  More than just robotics, each team is run like a company with sub-committees responsible for mechanical, electrical and programming but also marketing, public relations, communications, fundraising and animation.  Hence, the program is interdisciplinary, forcing techies to collaborate with non-techies which reflects real-world project management.

Students who participate in FIRST are twice as likely to go to college and university, twice as likely to study in STEM fields, and ten times as likely to participate in an internship or coop in their first year of college and university.

This is why longtime sponsors of FIRST include companies such as Boeing, Chrysler, Rockwell Automation, BAE Systems, Google, Xerox and other Fortune 500 companies in addition to organizations such as NASA.  They understand that this is about developing the human capital that will fuel their future.

In FIRST, these sponsors not only provide financial support but, most importantly, they commit their engineers, computer programmers, scientists and other professionals to serve directly as that work alongside students.

In Windsor and Essex, we have taken this program one step further by actually locating the design and build operations for one of our high school robotics teams inside a manufacturing plant belonging to Centerline—a local company with a global footprint. 
 

Imagine thirty high school students, a handful of mentors from Centerline, Rockwell, GM, Brave Controls and Valiant, and one or two teachers building a robot for the upcoming competition surrounded by a battalion of million-dollar industrial robots on the factory floor. 

With FIRST, the lines separating industry and education are erased.

We have now expanded FIRST to include four new high schools and we expect to have a total of 10 high schools in Windsor and Essex competing in FIRST next year.

We also expect to host a FIRST Robotics Regional Tournament at the University of Windsor in 2014 that will draw 1,000 high school students from Ontario, Michigan, Indiana, Ohio and as far out as California, Mexico, and Germany.

For this to happen, we will require local industry to step up and play a leadership role in support of FIRST Robotics in our region by either sponsoring FIRST teams, committing some mentoring, or by sponsoring the Regional Robotics tournament.

Guest Blog Post

Irek Kusmierczyk, PhD, is a Program Manager with WEtech Alliance and is responsible for promoting S.T.E.M education in Windsor and Essex.  Those interested in FIRST should contact him at: ikusmierczyk@wetech-alliance.com