In Conn., entrepreneurship program plugs into STEM
By Madeline Patton, Published May 21, 2010

A video game that teaches about air pollution, an online prom dress resale store and a business that sells bat houses are among the environment-themed projects that recently competed for venture capital at the Connecticut Student Innovation Expo in Hartford, Conn.

The souped-up science fair–where detailed business plans, multi-page Web sites, humorous videos and slick marketing pitches take the place of poster boards–wrapped up yearlong, highly interactive courses that 750 students took at 35 high schools in either e-commerce, biology, digital media, or information technology research and design.

The Center for 21st Century Skills used an Advanced Technological Education (ATE) grant from the National Science Foundation to create curricula that make systemic changes in high school science instruction. In tandem with this ambitious goal, the curricula seek to put students on technical career paths and bridge the significant achievement gaps between the state's urban and suburban youth.

The center is part of Education Connection and has worked closely with the Regional Center for Next Generation Manufacturing on the ATE grant for Connecticut Pathways to Innovation (CPI) project. The regional center connects CPI to major employers and community colleges in the state. Business representatives and community college faculty members serve as curricula advisors, mentors to the students and faculty, and judges at the expo.

While only one team wins money to convert its project into a real business, the product-driven work culminating in the Expo makes lessons about science, math, technology and business dynamic to students who might otherwise drift through high school, according to the students, high school teachers and community college faculty involved in CPI.

“Their program is fantastic for opening these students’ awareness of entrepreneurship in high school,” said Theresa Janeczek, assistant professor of entrepreneurship and business at Manchester Community College.

Janeczek has served as an Expo judge, an advisor for the high school curricula that articulates with Connecticut’s 12 community colleges and a host when the high school students visit the college campus. As the program has matured and grown, she’s begun hearing students in her college business courses refer to their high school CPI experiences.

“It creates a great pathway to continue their education in the community college system,” Janeczek said.

An evaluation of CPI during its first two years of ATE funding concluded the project had made "significant progress" developing a sequence of STEM courses that:

• align with the community college system
• create a hybrid learning environment
• establish collaborative relationships between high school teachers, college and university faculty and business people

It also noted that students reported an increase in understanding the challenges and opportunities of using technology to solve problems, an increase in their development of higher order thinking skills and their ability to apply “higher order thinking” to a complex research project.

A separate survey of alumni from an early version of the project when it was an after-school initiative found that CPI positively influences academic activities and career plans of students from traditionally under-represented minority populations.

Holding on with hands-on learning

Michael Mino, director of the Center for 21st Century Skills and principal investigator of the ATE grant, explained that his goal for CPI is to reach “the middle 60 percent who have the ability to perform at college level, but who are turned off by STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) because of the way it is taught at high schools.”

CPI holds students’ attention by combining their interest in social causes with state-of-the-art online instruction and well-structured, hands-on classroom activities. 

“When you’re trying to solve a problem, it just seems more engaging,” said Vincent Moore, a senior at Pathways to Technology Magnet School.

Moore is the Web designer for Bat in the House Enterprises, which received the Most Promising Business Concept prize at the Expo. That means the 21-student team will receive $2,500 and mentoring to makes its nonprofit business plan real. 

Bat in the House’s products are bat houses made of recycled materials. The bat houses are intended to help restore wild bat populations decimated by White-nose Syndrome.  

“It’s a real cool issue,” Moore explained, adding that one of his favorite parts of CPI is “we all work together to create a business that will help the community.”

Moore’s affinity for the group aspect of CPI is noteworthy, given his success as a solo entrepreneur. As a junior, Moore started his own business designing logos, business cards and other marketing materials for small businesses. He now has 14 clients and an acceptance letter to the University of Notre Dame, which he plans to attend beginning in the fall.

Moore’s success is a victory for John Griffin, a technology teacher at Pathways magnet school, who said Moore seemed on the verge of dropping out of school until a quick entrepreneur project in a technology class clicked with him freshman year. Griffin says CPI provides similar motivation for his other, mostly minority, students to finish high school and make plans to enroll in college.  

Mixing virtual, face-to-face interactions

The teachers in CPI courses serve as coaches rather than lecturers. They guide students’ research and keep the teams on track as they develop their mock, and sometimes real, businesses, games or inventions. Much of the subject content is delivered to students online using Moodle. The open-source online learning platform arranges optimal use of Internet resources for students and teachers, provides students with feedback about online assignments and provides a forum for students to interact while they work on projects.

“It’s like business Facebook,” said Arjun Mohan, also a senior in the e-commerce course at the Pathways magnet school. “I prefer using computers and actually doing things rather than just listening.”

CPI’s performance components, however, require students to disengage from their computers and friends for quarterly, regional meetings where they are randomly assigned to brainstorm and work on other tasks for start-up businesses with students from other schools. A portion of the time at the fall semester meetings are set aside for students to present information about their individual projects. At the last meeting in the spring, students share information about their team projects.

“The off-site visits are a huge part of it,” said Laura Roblee, the lead teacher in the business department at Hill Regional Career High School. The meetings, which are either on community college campuses or at businesses, broaden students’ cultural experiences and provide valuable feedback. The meetings require students to interact with business professionals and community college faculty, as well as students from different socioeconomic backgrounds. 

“It just gives us another avenue of getting kids to perform in front of people,” Griffin said.

At the March quarterly meeting at IBM, Roblee’s 10 students talked with other digital media students and a professional game developer. Afterward, the students revised their air pollution video game to make it more scientific and less of a Star Wars-like adventure game. This required more research about the causes and prevention of air pollution, but the students came back from the meeting motivated to do the extra work.

“The hands-on learning is a large part of the success of this program,” Roblee said, explaining that CPI allows students to build on their strengths–the student who likes English typically writes the research report, while the information technology whiz does the programming for the game–yet exposes them to other aspects of creative enterprises.

Warren Prindle, an art teacher at Housatonic Valley Regional High School, has found CPI works well with his rural students, too.

“This is just set up very well to get kids plugged in. I’m really sold on it,” Prindle said.