EPIC Education through Engineering: Keeping an EYE on Mobile’s Workforce

(This story appeared in the Fall 2009 issue of ABPC’s Working Toward Excellence journal. For an update on the progress of EYE – the Engaging Youth in Engineering program led by the Mobile Area Education Foundation and the Mobile County Schools – see this May 2010 blog post by John Norton. )

The essential question on Susan Pruet’s mind these days is this: Will an EYE on Mobile’s future workforce demands lead to an EPIC interest in engineering and technical careers?

More specifically, Pruet wonders, can a combination of challenging academic content and project-based learning (1) increase student engagement; (2) help reduce dropout rates; (3) lure more students into math, science and engineering careers; and (4) strengthen teaching and learning across one of Mobile County’s diverse school feeder patterns.

Let’s get some acronyms out of the way. Pruet works for MAEF—the Mobile Area Education Foundation—where she’s best known for fostering the Mobile Math Initiative in a strong partnership with the Mobile County Public School System (MCPSS).

EYE is a new K-8 initiative of the foundation and its partners, aimed at “Engaging Youth in Engineering” through elementary clubs and camps and through a dynamic “mini-curriculum” for middle schoolers that infuses real-world problems into state math and science standards.

EPIC, or the Engineering Pathways Integrated Curriculum, is a challenging four-year “theme” program at Mobile’s Davidson High School—conceived, designed and implemented by a team of outstanding young teachers and offered as either a “major” or a “minor” to all students willing to accept the challenge.

Pruet’s job—working closely with high school principal Lewis Copeland and his colleagues at the middle and elementary levels of Davidson’s feeder pattern—is to nurture strong connections among these programs and help district leaders produce an uninterrupted stream of students eager to further explore science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) as they move through the grades toward college and careers.

EPIC: Teacher innovation and principal leadership

Davidson High’s EPIC program predates EYE by several years. The impetus, says longtime principal Copeland, came from several young teachers on his faculty, including math instructor Mike Fletcher, a 2003 recipient of the national Milken Educator Award (in only his fifth year of teaching).

Davidson “is a very active and vital high school” of 1,500 students, says MCPSS deputy superintendent Martha Peek. In addition to EPIC, Copeland has started an International Baccalaureate program and aggressively recruits (some say “steals”) top content specialists from other faculties in and out of Mobile County. Once mostly white and suburban, Davidson is now a school in demographic transition, with a large number of international students and an African-American student population approaching 60 percent.

Peek says MCPSS is shifting toward the concept of developing “pocket programs” like the Davidson model, with a major theme (in this case, engineering) and the option for students to transfer from other attendance zones if they can arrange transportation. EPIC is currently the most prominent of what she hopes will become many high-interest concentrations (from pre-medicine to coastal studies) spread across Mobile’s 13 pubic high schools.

Planning for EPIC began in 2003, sparked by discussions among Copeland, DHS instructional leader Brenda Bolton, and interested teachers. The concept gained school board approval in 2004. The first year of the EPIC experiment was left mostly to Fletcher, who integrated engineering concepts and projects into his advanced math classes and offered special electives to the 20-odd students who agreed to participate.

Over the next several years, the program assumed its present shape. Students commit to either an EPIC major or minor at the beginning of ninth grade. In doing so, they agree to work their way thorough EPIC’s rigorous engineering-augmented math curriculum. As the EPIC website explains:

Instead of taking Algebra 2 with Trig, EPIC students will take the EPIC version… As an example, students learn about direct and inverse variation by testing simple circuits and discovering how Ohm’s Law relates voltage amperage and resistance. They learn the same concepts but with an application related to electrical engineering.

EPIC majors are expected to reach the math summit—Advanced Placement calculus, physics, and the like—while most minors complete at least pre-calculus. Depending on whether they’re majoring or minoring, students select all or most of their EPIC Education electives from the EPIC slate of offerings. It all begins in ninth grade, when every EPIC student enrolls in an exciting, hands-on elective, Engineering the Future, developed by the Boston Museum of Science.

By offering a major and a minor, the EPIC program anticipates the “multiple pathways” approach to high school studies, now gaining traction across the district. Students may choose the minor because they don’t want to give up all of their electives (e.g., music, art, journalism) to EPIC. Or they may not be sure they want to pursue a four-year degree—or concentrate on math and science in college—but they enjoy technical studies and feel the pull of EPIC’s hands-on, problem-based learning methods.

Rapid growth and low overhead

Over a five-year period, EPIC enrollment has grown to 250 students, with more expected next year. Copeland likes to point out that EPIC is staffed by teachers “from our state allocation,” not extra faculty. Even so, any time he’s had an opening in math or science, Copeland has recruited aggressively with EPIC in mind.

As a result, he’s assembled an impressive cadre of teachers, mostly in their 30s. Some felt called to teaching from first careers in STEM-related areas—including two engineers and a meteorologist. There’s also an attorney with an undergrad degree in mathematics, a former scientific draftsman, and a selection of top teacher ed graduates from regional universities.

Teacher Hurd Finnegan, who introduces EPIC’s ninth graders to engineering concepts, gives credit for the program’s progress to the leadership skills of Copeland and Bolton.

“They create an environment that allows teachers to experiment and take risks,” says Finnegan, noting that the leadership style attracts and holds talented teachers. “You hire good people and tell them what you want done. Then you let them go do it,” he says. “If there’s a mistake, you take the heat. If good results occur, you let your people take the credit.”

The diverse backgrounds of EPIC’s teaching team have inspired some atypical elective courses, including environmental and patent law, fluid dynamics, drafting, electrical engineering design processes, geoscience and meteorology, and technical writing and communications—taught by an English faculty member who recently joined the EPIC team.

“What’s made EPIC go has been the enthusiasm of the teachers,” says Copeland. “It’s their program and they live and breathe it every day.” When we dropped by Jamie Duke’s EPIC physics class, he was openly excited about a collision experiment the day before. The data seemed to defy the law of energy conservation. Duke was literally rubbing his hands together as his students drifted in, and he soon put them to work ferreting out the problem.

“There’s nothing like a mystery to get the brains churning,” he laughed. As the class progressed, students could be overheard saying, “It’s not that… could it be this?” as they tried and re-tried the experiments. Not far away, a poster displayed the engineering design cycle: Imagine, Plan, Create, Test, Improve.

Brenda Bolton, whose official title is Assistant Principal for Curriculum and EPIC, says the teachers defy any stereotype about high school faculty who resist collaboration. “These teachers function as a team. They meet together both formally and informally. When some issue comes up about the program, we work together to resolve it. One teacher will find a grant and they’ll all plan the proposal. They’re constantly collaborating.”

What does such a program cost? Copeland laughs. “We’ve pretty much operated it on a shoestring from the beginning,” he says. EPIC teachers are regular faculty members, pulled in to teach non-EPIC courses as needed. Most other costs are covered within the normal school budget, supplemented by small grants and gifts of support from local industry.

“MAEF has really assisted us there,” says Bolton. “They’ve helped us network with business and industries that have a strong interest in producing future engineers and math and science majors.” Bolton also cites the tireless efforts of Robert Foley, assistant dean of engineering at the University of South Alabama, to raise the program’s visibility.

There’s one big exception to the “shoestring budget,” Copeland admits. Several years into the program, an EPIC teacher who’s a former chemical engineer came to his office and said, “You know, if we’re really going to be an engineering program, we have to have a lab.” Copeland says his commitment to EPIC “has always been to not say ‘no.’” So he asked, how much? Perhaps $100,000, she said.

Ultimately, Copeland was able to secure a one-time special grant from the state legislature for $50,000. Other contributions would be forthcoming from private sources. But even with start-up money in hand, the big problem was space. Davidson outgrew its physical plant long ago—to the point that new teachers spend their first years “teaching from a cart” as they move to any available classroom during the day.

There was, however, a former girl’s locker room now used for storage. And sure enough, the EPIC lab is today located in the sizeable space where female athletes once donned their workout gear. The robotics club assembles its digital marvels in the shower. The lab’s most impressive fixture is a massive fluid flow apparatus donated by the USA College of Engineering. The device allows students to explore the science and math involved in fluid pressure, fluid flow, buoyancy and related topics. It’s now being computerized to increase its teaching potential.

Can EPIC take its success to scale?

The humble EPIC lab may be creating some recruitment problems that a generous donor could solve. On a visit to a DHS feeder middle school, we overheard a student keen on robotics saying he didn’t want to move from his school’s cutting-edge lab “to a shower stall.” Even so, the program’s enrollment has grown each year, with Fletcher most often serving as the recruiter who lures promising eighth graders from across the system. EPIC teachers Amy Harper and Sara Martin handle many of the student management chores—getting students’ schedules straight, making sure they earn all the necessary EPIC credits, and planning a week-long spring celebration of engineering.

EPIC and a similar program at the Birmingham-area’s Hoover High School are also credited with helping spark the Alabama Engineering Academy Initiative, a partnership among the State Department of Education, Auburn University, and the University of Alabama System.

Indeed, EPIC has impressed almost everyone. Last February, the Mobile Area Council of Engineers took the unusual step of naming EPIC its Engineering Project of the Year. If there’s any concern about EPIC, it’s that the program currently draws its enrollment primarily from outside its own feeder pattern, relying mostly on students with traditional college aspirations. If Mobile expects to produce the large STEM workforce it needs, some supporters say, tapping into the traditional college-bound student pool will not be enough.

Enter EYE.

EYE: Early interest and inquiry learning

The long-range goal for EYE, explains MAEF’s Susan Pruet, “is really to provide a model that the district can use to produce STEM-ready graduates across the entire system.” More immediately, EYE aims to grow a larger pool of potential EPIC students for Davidson from schools within its own feeder pattern—a mixed demographic set that includes two middles (Burns and Denton) and six elementaries (E.R. Dickson, Dodge, Fonde, Griggs, Meadowlake and Shepard).

At least 50% of the students at each of these feeder schools meet federal poverty guidelines—including those at Burns Middle, a newly designated Title I school that many Mobilians might still identify as “suburban.” By promoting interest in STEM subjects at these schools, Pruet says EYE and EPIC will not only reach a non-traditional student audience but can profit from the school system’s new reliance on feeder patterns to drive K-12 reforms.

“EYE is not just about producing engineers,” Pruet says. “We’re building awareness in the schools and the larger community of the need for ALL students to take more and higher levels of math and science. Engineering provides an engaging way to ‘hook’ youngsters around that idea.”

The genesis of the EYE program can be traced back to a Chamber of Commerce trip several years ago, when a group of Mobile business and community leaders visited the Boston Museum of Science. There they learned of an innovative K-12 engineering curriculum designed to renew young people’s interest in technical careers.

Among those who became excited by the Boston program were Gigi Armbrecht, regional manager for AT&T, and Chris Lee, executive director of the J.L. Bedsole Foundation. The pair sought out Carolyn Akers, Pruet’s boss and the executive director of MAEF, and said emphatically, “We’ve got to do this.”

The board of Bedsole (a family foundation serving Mobile, Baldwin, Clarke, Monroe and Washington Counties) would support the venture, Lee said, if they could find additional partners. Akers, whose organization was already involved in workforce development issues, agreed to raise a portion of the funds. A critical third partner—Mobile County Public Schools—embraced the idea and offered to provide a share of EYE’s start-up costs.

The EYE curriculum

In its start-up phase, the Engaging Youth in Engineering program is targeting students in grades 4-8. “In our first two years of implementation,” Pruet says, “we’ve invested most of our funds in raising awareness, securing reusable equipment and materials, and building teaching capacity and student excitement.”

Fourth and fifth graders participate in EYE clubs after school, using Boston’s Engineering is Elementary curriculum. The research-based activities integrate engineering and technology concepts and skills with elementary science topics, literacy and social studies.

Upper elementary kids can also sign on for an activity-filled week of summer camp, organized around science-math themes in collaboration with the Gulf Coast Exploreum. This year’s “Camp AMPED” focused on electricity and the human body. Students also have a chance to make connections with participating EYE and EPIC teachers.

Pruet says EYE supporters realized early on that extra-curricular clubs and camps don’t reach all students. “It’s usually the youngsters with parents who have more schedule flexibility, carpools, and so forth. We miss many of our potential STEM stars by just focusing on the extra curricular.”

Partly for that reason, the EYE middle grades program aims to engage all students during a school’s regular daily schedule by blending hands-on engineering experiences into the science and math studies already mandated and assessed by the state. “Every sixth, seventh, and eigth grade student in our EYE middle schools is tackling problems using the engineering design process at least three times a year,” explains Pruet. “Each challenge involves a five-hour mix of math and science lessons over a week’s time.”

This repetitive exposure, Pruet says, “helps develop in students the ability to apply the math and science they are already learning. They analyze and interpret data; identify, formulate and solve problems, and communicate effectively—which includes listening. They function as part of a multi- disciplinary team, using the techniques, skills and tools needed in the workforce today.”

The decision to offer activities that complement (and keep pace with) Alabama’s math and science objectives meant creating an EYE curriculum from the ground up, with several criteria in mind: the resulting modules needed to be challenging and engaging, easy for teachers to use, and doable in a week’s time.

EYE advisor Suzanne McGill, former head of the University of South Alabama math department, authored the first engineering mini-units, which were piloted in 2007-08. Anne Jolly, a former science teacher at Burns and Alabama’s 1994 teacher of the year, joined the writing team to add science perspectives.

“We told the Burns teachers upfront that we’d be creating this curriculum from scratch, and they’d be our review team,” Pruet says. When a draft unit is ready for testing, teachers try it out during a hands-on PD session, teach it to students, and then brainstorm ways to improve it.

This process is strengthened by the daily presence of EYE coordinator Judy Duke, a retired Burns math teacher and instructional coach. Duke makes sure the EYE modules fit seamlessly into the regular curriculum. “I also do all the grunt work,” she says, including arranging for USA engineering students and volunteers from local companies like Alabama Power and Airbus to come and work with students.

Duke has a key role in helping teachers become more adept at student-centered teaching. “The teachers are trying to change their practice,” she says, “going to a more inquiry-based approach with students in teams, doing messy things—where the students are producing something, where they are solving problems using technology.”

EYE in the middle

This fall, all students at Burns Middle School and the Clark School of Mathematics, Science and Technology will experience the hands-on excitement of engineering design as they explore the science and math behind topics like wind energy, rocket propulsion, watershed management and lunar survival —and take charge of their own learning as they brainstorm, test and evaluate their products.

Clark students will be new to the EYE experience, but kids at Burns Middle have been willing guinea pigs for EYE’s pilot curriculum since the program began two years ago. “We like it because we use hands-on instead of the teacher just writing it on the board and saying, ‘this does this,’” one boy told us during a May chat with Burns eighth graders. “You want to focus a little more.” A girl who plans to attend MIT added: “it’s more about figuring things out for yourself.”

Burns and Denton Middle are the middle grades feeder schools for Davidson High, and Denton expects to join the program after teachers complete training for AMSTI (the state math and science initiative) which Pruet says is “a perfect complement to EYE.” In the meantime, Pruet needed a second pilot school and decided to invite Clark, which already sends many students to EPIC.

The Clark kids will love the program, says Burns principal John Adams. “And teachers learn to love it, too.”

“The teachers don’t have to change the curriculum objectives or whatever’s on the pacing guide,” Adams explains. “They’re just enriching the science and math objectives that are already there.”

Before EYE and its professional development, says Adams, “our science labs were not focused. Students didn’t produce anything or collect data the way they should.” In the EYE activities, and a companion engineering lab donated by Alabama Power, “our kids see the connection between math and science, which is so important in getting across the idea of relevance.”

Students also take charge of learning, says Burns math teacher Diana Nguyen. “Seventh graders aren’t used to taking the responsibility for learning all that much, unless you give them something like EYE, and they get that feeling of ownership. I don’t think they’ve ever felt this kind of responsibility before, and it’s a good way to introduce it to them.”

Science teacher Paige Till offers an example from the pilot Lunar Habitat module for seventh grade. “We had five roles and we only had four on a team, so one role—retrieving the data—had to rotate among the students. It was fun to do and sharing the job really provided a structure so that the kids kind of managed themselves. It gave them the responsibility and let them see that they could gather the results, do the process correctly, and be timely, too.”

During our Burns visit, sixth-grade teacher Homer Roberts was piloting a new mini-unit about watersheds for the first time. Don’t Go with the Flow involves students in studies about water sources, pollution and hydrology. When Roberts walked in the room carrying a large plastic model of a watershed (you can actually run water through it), some Robotics Club students working in a corner immediately dropped their ‘bots and rushed to see it.

“That’s a real statement,” Roberts says. “Our students are really stimulated by something like this, where the scientific content knowledge is demonstrated by something tangible. They know we will take them through the whole design process—designing it, testing it, making changes as they go through the testing. They get a real hands-on experience and they love it.”

EYE on Mobile’s future

Back at EYE headquarters, Pruet and the Mobile Area Education Foundation are pursuing a pattern of program development they’ve followed for many years—“Start small, think big.”

With several National Science Foundation grants in the works, MAEF hopes to secure the funds necessary to fully develop the EYE learning modules, research the effect of students “having a continuum of coordinated STEM experiences across the grades,” and scale up the work.

“The EYE initiative has been driven from day one by Mobile’s business and industry leaders,” Pruet says. “They’ve kept their three-year bargain and provided generous support. Now the NSF grants are critically important for us to keep growing the idea.”

Ultimately, MAEF would like to see other school systems in the Mobile region implement their own EYE programs with the foundation’s guidance and support. As the region’s demand for high-tech workers increases, Pruet says, more public schools are going to feel an urgency to move toward a STEM curriculum that shows the relevance of math and science and “grabs students’ hands and minds” by integrating those subjects with technology and real-world engineering challenges.

Duke, the EYE curriculum coach, tells a great story about that. Volunteers from Alabama Power arrived at Burns Middle School, ready to assist students as they began to design and build their own wind-energy turbines.

As the folks from Alabama Power introduced themselves and told something about their own connections to engineering, one student turned to Duke and whispered: “They’re not here to steal our ideas, are they?”