UC Education Team Reports for 'Silicon Valley Boot Camp'

A team from the University of Cincinnati will soon learn if its innovation, a unique professional development program for STEM teachers, can survive a “lean startup” boot camp in Silicon Valley.

The goal is to bring to scale a tested teacher professional development program, so that it can be sustained and even expanded when its current funding from the National Science Foundation ends in 2018. The team will embark on its seven-week, marathon journey on January 12th, which will involve two trips to Silicon Valley, 100 customer interviews and many adjustments or “pivots” to its originally conceived business plan based on customer feedback.

The University of Cincinnati launched the Cincinnati Engineering Enhanced Math and Science Program (

CEEMS

) in 2011 with $9.2 million in funding from NSF. Recently, this successful initiative received a second coveted award — an invitation to be part of the NSF’s first cohort of Innovation Corps for Learning (I-Corps L). Using lean start up strategies typically reserved for researchers and entrepreneurs, the National Science Foundation adapted I-Corps to bring promising STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) learning strategies into widespread use.

The teams selected will receive invaluable instruction, mentoring and feedback from an iCorps teaching team including persons from academia and industry throughout the bootcamp process. Final business models, based on findings, will be presented in a second trip to California at the end of February. Teams selected to the I-Corps L will be awarded $50,000 for expenses related to the process.

The CEEMS I-Corps L team Anant Kukreti, principal investigator for CEEMS and CEAS professor and director of outreach Kukreti brings his extensive experience in executing several major K-12 outreach projects for students and teachers in order to increase the yield of STEM post-secondary students. Melisse May will be the entrepreneurial lead. Retired from Procter & Gamble, May is a chemical engineer by trade but worked primarily in marketing and business development during the latter part of her career. Jack Broering will serve as the volunteer mentor. Broering is a member of the CEEMS Resource Team and retired from The Dow Chemical Co. Like May, Broering is a chemical engineer, but later in his career he trained engineering teams in using the Six Sigma methodology. CEEMS Project Director Julie Steimle also will assist the team, which has named itself Better Engineered STEM Teachers (BEST).

The team will use its I-Corps L training to determine how to best package a professional development program for STEM teachers. Currently, the CEEMS program trains teachers in ways to engage students in engineering activities in order to demonstrate the exciting real-world applications of math and science. In addition to workshops and classes, the training program provides the teachers with coaches who are seasoned educators and engineers, and allows teachers to engage in their own hands-on engineering challenges.

If the marketable professional development programs developed by the team are successful, the region as a whole can expect to benefit from STEM teachers with an engineering mindset. As has been demonstrated already in the CEEMS program, this often translates into increased student engagement and achievement in math and science.