Over the past two days, We Energies hosted four tours of their coal handling facility in Oak Creek for students in our Zoo Train Challenge. A team of five from We Energies walked students through the procedures they follow to safely store and move coal from when it arrives by train to when it is used in the power plant. On their tour of the facility, students were able to see the equipment and systems in use.
What students learned about how to manage coal on a very large scale, they will now bring to bear as they think through how to revise the coal handling process at the Zoo.
Our 4th season of Collab Labs kicked off on October 10th with a focus on building skilled trades talent. We began the discussion by building an inventory of the skills we’d like to see students develop. These fell into two broad categories:
Technical Skills
Design Skills
Read blueprints & technical drawings
Fine motor skills/hand-eye coordination
Math and measurement
Budgeting/Understanding job costs
General understanding of construction trades
Equipment/resource planning
Soft Skills
Creativity/Innovation/Problem solving
Fail Fast
Safety
Ability to take constructive criticism
Ability to take direction
Self Advocacy
Self discipline/integrity/follow through/show up ready to work
Self confidence
Determination/grit
Collaboration/Interpersonal skills within a team
Communication skills
Ability to listen
Willingness to learn/ask thoughtful question
From there we asked each discussion group to talk through experiences that do or could provide opportunities to build those skills. Here’s what they came up with:
Build2Learn Camp $500 stipend for summer workshop
European model – apprentices
Engage employers – job shadow
Inspire/Awe – Makerspace Home Depot creative space
Intentionally incorporate soft skills into lessons
Provide high interest projects
Bring industry speakers into the classroom
Real world applications with purpose – e.g. 3D prosthetics
Mentorships
Teamwork: moving a project to completion
Presenting/exhibiting craft work
Building confidence with no or low risk simulations.
Leverage connections and take them to scale
Address skills gaps with “it takes a village” perspective
Get professionals into classrooms
They can learn from students
Talk with students, not down to them
Our final step was to have each group take those ideas, talk through what a program might look like, and share that out with the entire group. Here’s where they landed:
Project Start to finish real world application
Build a house
Bring in industry
Have mentors
Engage employers
Build soft skills
Build technical skills
Goal is to have job ready workers, provide apprenticeships, job opportunities.
Identify industry partner/employer
Ask “What do you need from us?”
Identify what workforce needs exist
Identify training/skills needed
Company sponsored projects
Materials or time
Interviews of
the company
the student
Interdisciplinary/project based learning
Working with other schools/districts
Protocols
Feedback models – Hard on content/soft on person
Leverage technology
Skype team meetings
Drone/webcams of projects progressing
Build excitement about upcoming technologies
Early Hands-on Exposure
Youth apprenticeships
Out of comfort zone
Peer mentorship
Self-realization/mediation
Options (electives)
Students: Littles – early exposure
Education Workplace: Welcoming anti-racist, data-driven, performance based
What’s needed to move forward: Looking past personal bias, equal access to opportunities, a cultural shift
Industry-owned Youth Apprenticeships
IDing under-served population
Mapped to skilled trades values and skills
Bringing the industry straight to the families
Thanks to CG Schmidt for sponsoring our food and beverages for the evening, The Commons for providing the space, and to our featured participants for sharing their expertise and ideas,
Peter Graven – Earth Science/ Life Science/ Robotics, Deer Creek Intermediate School (St Francis)
Craig Griffie – Technology Education, Brown Deer High School
Chloe Smith is the UWM PhD student leading the English classes working piloting our Career Interviews project. She’s published a blog post about the experience here
Things are off to a good start:
I’m blown away by how engaged these students have been, and how willing they are to work through a research process that, for most of them, is entirely new. They’re approaching these interviews—and the prospect of the research that will come after—with enthusiasm and creativity.
This year 140 students from 11 area schools will participate in our Zoo Train Challenge– redesign the coal handling process used for the Zoo’s steam locomotives. At yesterday’s kick-off event, students had a chance to visit the site, see what it’s like to lift a bushel bucket of coal, and meet their peers from other schools.
Before we went into a Q & A session, we sat students at tables where they got to know peers from other schools and worked together to identify the questions they wanted to see answered at the session. That process was led by Dr. David Howell from MSOE, who brought along 13 MSOE student volunteers to help facilitate the work at each table.
While students went through that work, teachers and industry advisers had a chance to meet and talk through how they will run the project in their classrooms. Two New Berlin students from last year’s challenge joined us for the event– one, who went to the school board for permission to retake the engineering class so she could participate this year, and a second who is now at MSOE, and came along to help.
The weather was less than ideal, but the Public Math booth was there for the Doors Open Milwaukee Block party. Visitors had the chance to play with math actives and test their Venn diagramming skills with a street survey.
Shevaun Watson, Director of the composition program in UWM’s English Department, and I met for coffee in April to talk about her work on the landscape of languages. Followers of Learn Deep know of our interest in maps as a point of engagement for students, and I was curious to learn more. There’s an interesting project in that work, particularly for schools with students who speak a diverse range of languages.
Towards what I had expected to be the end of our conversation, Shevaun asked what else we were working on. I mentioned an idea that had originated in conversations at Reagan High School. While the school had healthcare career tracks, students had little sense of the broad range of careers inside of healthcare or the varied paths people might take to get there. We thought an interesting way to address that would be to have students interview folks in a wide range of health care careers. The focus would not be on the classes they took or what their day to day work looks like, but the experiences they had which led them to their career and helped develop the skills they now use. We saw this as a process that could be used across domains, and, if the stories could be gathered and told by students across the community, a great resource for career exploration.
Shevaun was intrigued — she and her colleagues have been looking at ways to leverage the humanities for community engagement. They were also getting a little tired of reading “interest papers” on abortion, gun control, and legalizing marijuana. She asked “What if we gave you a couple of sections of a freshman English class to pilot the process?” Over the summer we met with Shevaun’s team and teachers from Reagan, New Berlin, and Dr. Howard Fuller Collegiate Academy to map out what that might look like, and what the high schools teachers would need to pull the work into their classes.
Our pilot is now underway. We tapped our network to assemble a pool of interview candidates that includes everyone from a community healthcare advocate to bio-medical engineers to sports medicine professionals to an attorney representing the rights of the disabled. Students will conduct their interviews the week of October 7th. We look forward to where this will lead.
Students from seven area high schools met a UWM yesterday for a session on occupational ergonomics lead by Madiha Saeed Ahmed from UWM’s College of Engineering. The students are part of this year’s Zoo Train Engineering Challenge, will is focused on improving the coal handling process for the Zoo’s steam locomotives.
The current process is to manually sift coal into buckets which can weigh 90 pounds when full. These are carried down an uneven walkway along the tracks where they are staged until needed. When the train staff need to re-load coal for the train, the buckets are dumped into the train’s tender, through an opening that is close to four feet off the ground. Needless to say, plenty of issues to look at.
Our math booth was out at Maker Faire this weekend testing out activities with kids and families. Mary Langmyer brought her enthusiasm and wagon full of materials to engage students in math explorations.
MATC started their fieldwork to create a survey and site plan of the coal handling area at the Milwaukee County Zoo. The survey work will give students participating in our Zoo Train Challenge an accurate site plan for the area as they look to redesign the coal handling process. The survey effort is led by instructor David Langhoff, who was looking for an opportunity to get his students engaged in a real world project. MATC students working to help middle and high school students help the Zoo. #Collaboration
Our Collab Lab series is back for a 4th season! Join us on October 10th to kick off the series with Collab Lab 29: Building Skilled Trades Talent. The complete schedule for the season is below.
