Ep 80 | STEM Avoidance to Confidence: STARBASE

SPEAKER_00 0:00

It's an simulated aircraft carrier. So when our fifth graders show up, they come across the plank and onto the ship. Um, and then they're immersed into the STEM program.

SPEAKER_01 0:13

And I it takes immersion to a next level that you're in a simulated aircraft carrier. Welcome to the Voices United in Education podcast. Each week we showcase the teachers, administrators, and community members who go the extra mile to contribute to the success of every student in Escambi County. You'll meet the real people behind the titles and learn about the amazing resources to support every student's success. One of the challenges parents face is helping their kids overcome academic setbacks. Statements like, I don't like science and I'm just not good at math can be bigger obstacles than the homework itself. And the encouraging voice of mom or dad can fall on deaf ears. My next guest is not only a fresh voice, she's a complete pattern interrupt. After serving 31 years in the Air Force, she's now the director of the Department of Defense Starbase Pensacola, an immersive STEM experience program for fifth graders. Today she's going to share how this program is creating unique opportunities and confidence to last a lifetime. Creative educator, STEM supporter, retired United States Air Force Colonel Rita Miller. Thanks for being here. Well, thank you, Meredith. I'm very pleased to be here. I'm so glad you're here. This is such a cool program. And this is such a very different job description from what you used to do and very different personnel, I might say. So why does this program matter to you? Why is this what you want to be doing?

SPEAKER_00 1:57

Well, I was an educator for 15 years, and I specifically taught fifth and sixth grade. And I have always thought education was very, very important. So what I did is when I was offered this position in Oklahoma, I came from Oklahoma. I was director of four of these sites in Oklahoma, four military installations there. And when I got offered the job here, I thought it's in a it's in my perfect world. I've got a beach and I've got kids and things are going to be great, and I'm going to bring a lot to Pensacola. I talked to the base commander because the program is specifically for fifth graders and it has to be on a military installation. So the base commander was all about it, all excited. And they put us in the National Flight Academy, which is a building on base. It's a simulated aircraft carrier. So when our fifth graders show up, they come across the plank and onto the ship. Then they're immersed into the STEM program.

SPEAKER_01 3:09

And I it takes immersion to a next level that you're in a simulated aircraft carrier.

SPEAKER_00 3:16

Absolutely. We get with the teachers, their classroom teachers prior to them coming. We have them come up with call signs. So they come to the ship with their call sign. We put it on their name tags and we call them by their call signs, which there have been some pretty interesting call signs, you know. Uh but anything that you can share. Oh, we've had some that are called striker. And of course, everybody wants to be Maverick. But there was some that, you know, moonbeam and, you know, some some out there and then some I can't share. We had to get them to change them. And this is why your job is never boring. It isn't. And the you know, with kids, they want to learn. They may not seem they want to learn, but they do. They just have to have the right direction and they have to have meaning behind it. Because as you remember, when you were in classes, they're just like, I don't like this. This is this has nothing. I don't want to do this. I I don't don't like science. I don't like math. So we primarily go for Title I schools is what we're centered for, for those that are underprivileged and underserved. So those children might not have the experiences behind them to even know what they really like. They have just been in a textbook. And when we have bring them to our hands-on, minds-on program, and that's what it is. I mean, it's hands-on. We do not do a lot of writing. We record data in our logbook and things like that, but there's not a lot of writing. There's minimal reading, but we have them in teams. So they will be Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo, and how many kids we have. So we teach teamwork because in most of the jobs that they're going to be in their careers, they're going to have to work with one or more people, and they're going to have to be a team. So we tell them that, you know, teamwork's important. One person might come up with the idea, but it's going to take a team to make it happen. We we have the teachers put them in their groups, but we don't have them pick their groups because of course they'd pick their friends. We want them to get to know everybody. So at the beginning of the schools, the school, when we have, you know, they've just been in in August and they may not know everybody, they don't really know if they like that person and or they want to work with that person. And we see there, even in the fifth grade level, that you have that like, well, I don't want to work with him. And by the time we've turned around in that second week or third week, everybody's working together. So we've we've managed that. That's been real good. The kids, the kids are into it. On our first day, they come in, we take them into a ready room, which is just like on Top Gun. When you see the pilot sitting in the seat, they get their briefing. So after the briefing, they go into the JIC, which is the Joint Intelligence Center, which is just where really their classroom. And that's where they'll do all the experiments and hands-on. And then the Department of Defense starbase program requires us to have three hours of computer-aided design. So they have to go into the CAD lab or the jock, which is the joint operations center. And so they'll they will move about and they don't sit a lot. They are up and and because you know studies have shown that they sit there, you're going to lose them. That's just kids.

SPEAKER_01 6:47

That's me too. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 6:48

And a lot of adults are like that. Yes. After a certain amount of time, yes. And so they are up and moving. We have robotics. They have to code. So that's part of our curriculum also.

SPEAKER_01 6:59

So is the robotics part of the the computer lab or is that a different hands-on different hands-on.

SPEAKER_00 7:05

That's back in the in the JIC in the intelligence center. They will take the robot and they will tell it to go left, right, you know, forward, how many steps? And they have to measure. So we got math in there, but they don't know they're doing math. And that's the great thing about this program is they they do a lot of science, math, engineering, and they they don't, but they don't realize they're doing. It's just, you know, a step for them to get, you know, Dash over to a certain point. Dash has Dash is the robot, and Dash has to go and recover a plane or recover something. So to get there, you have so much distance. So you have to tell in coding, you have to tell Dash how to get there. Oh, I love that. So he, you know, the the one child I watched one young gentleman do that, and he was like, I did it, I did it, I did it, I did it. And so he was so excited. Uh, and they they surprise themselves, you know, when they've they've accomplished something like that, which is really good.

SPEAKER_01 8:14

Are the robots the the ones, the ghost robotics uh robot securities from Panama City Base, or are they different robots?

SPEAKER_00 8:21

They're different robots. They're they can be bought online. They're they're for any, they're for like K through twelfth grade. I mean, you can they're not very, very big, but we used them. We did a baseball STEM camp this past summer at the Blue Wahoos, and we dressed them up in baseball uniforms and they had- Dressed up the robots? Dressed up the little robots. We made little the kids, the kids made little, we we dressed them up. And so what they did is they had to go around the baseball field. It's a smaller version, of course, and they had to, you know, beat the other one that they were going against. So it was it was really fun. And again, they had to measure, they had to figure out how much how much of a measurement they had to go to get to second base, to third base and fourth base and so on. And, you know, they don't realize that they're doing math. They may hate measurement. They may not, they may say, and they do. They say, I don't like, you know, I don't like giving her a ruler and measuring. Well, you know, that's part of it. And they don't realize that. And when they do realize that they did math, it's like, oh, I didn't know that's how you did it. We measure liquids. Liquid is a has a different measurement all itself, rather than a linear measurement, right? And they do great at that. They learn that there's, you know, the meniscus in the flask or in the uh graduated cylinder, and they go, Oh, you know, that makes a difference in the measurement. It's not just a straight line. So they they learn things, technology, they go in, and of course, most of the kids we have were raised with technology, so they know that. But they get in and their CAD program, um, they're repairing the International Space Station.

SPEAKER_01 10:10

Oh my gosh. And so that's so cool.

SPEAKER_00 10:13

We gradually build them up so that on their third hour in that, they will be working on the International Space Station and correcting some of the things that have gone wrong there.

SPEAKER_01 10:22

So you've got measurement, you've got uh teamwork, you've got social skills and confidence building. You mentioned the student that said, I did it, I did it, I did it. That is a lot of benefit packed into one, you know, program. But I think from the outside looking in, a person might say, wait a minute, no paper, no pen. Is this a field trip?

SPEAKER_00 10:47

It is not a field trip. It it is looked on at probably in just the term from the schools, because it is a, you know, outsider school. And anything outside of school is usually a field trip. But it is five hours of STEM. They come, the students and their teachers, their classroom teachers, will come in on their bus and uh they stay with us for five hours for five days. So it's not consecutive days. We bring them in like Mrs. Smith, Mrs. Jones brings theirs on Monday, Monday, you know, the the next five Mondays. And then Tuesday has a different set of teachers and and so on and so on. We have 10 classes a week.

SPEAKER_01 11:29

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 11:29

So over a session, a session's five weeks long. So over a session, we'll have up to 250 kids in that session.

SPEAKER_01 11:38

Incredible. Now, how do they view you? Because, you know, maybe they're used to a traditional classroom teacher, and you are certainly an educator, that you can just feel it when when I'm talking with you, that you are passionate about educating, but you're a little bit different than maybe the the regular classroom teacher. So what's their reaction to you and when they find out maybe what your job was in the Air Force?

SPEAKER_00 12:07

It is it's very interesting because on our career day, our fifth day is actually our career, our graduation day. We've had the Blue Angel uh maintenance team come over and talk to the kids about maintaining the aircraft and all that, and several great speakers, and we're always looking for any speakers to come in. But I have filled in as a career speaker, and so I always ask them the first thing is, what do you, what do you, you know, as a woman, what do you think I did in the Air Force? And most of them are the stereotypical, well, you were a nurse or you were a secretary or whatever. And I wait a minute before I tell them and I go into that. Well, I started out in the Air Force building bombs. And most of them look at me with their little mouths open, like, what? You're a woman. And um, you know, and then some of them say, Well, can we make one? I go, No, we can't make them. So I have to, you know, I have to back up out on my teaching manner. No. But then I said, you know, you can be or do anything that you want to do. I said, I would have never seen me. I said, I was 24 when I started building bombs. I would have never seen me doing anything like that, but I was taught to do that in the Air Force. And it was, it was, it taught me that I can learn anything because I had always stayed away from anything that had ammunition. I mean, I I grew up with three brothers and they, you know, went hunting and all that, but I never did. So I wanted to do something different. So I challenged myself. And that's what I'd like the kids to do is challenge yourself to do something that you haven't done before, but you have an interest in it. If you like, you know, if you like something, you'll go for it anyway. But if it challenges you, it may make you stop and think, oh, I don't want to, I don't want to do that. And I think that the kids, they have to know that it's okay to fail. We teach them, or we don't teach them failure, but we make them engineering design process is a whole process of going through everything and it might fail. It might not work the first time, it might not work the second time. But there's a lot of things that we use every day that I tell the kids, you don't know how many times it took to get it to how they wanted it. And I said, it doesn't come out of the production just like like it, you know, for how it's supposed to be and perfect. And the kids will go, yeah, yeah. So they they don't look at it as, you know, it's just to look at it and go, I'm gonna redesign it. So what can I change? And that's a whole lot of the engineering design process built around what can I change to make it better? So they learn that, and that's beneficial to them in many things.

SPEAKER_01 15:09

Redesigning failure. I love that. You mentioned to me off mic that the program additionally teaches them how to think, not what to think. That is a tall order. How how do you accomplish that in five days?

SPEAKER_00 15:27

We can't master science and math in five days. If we could, we'd probably be really, really busy, busy, busy all over the world. But what we do is we just want to to maybe give them a hint or give them, enhance them or pique an interest of something that they the robotics is something that interests them because a lot of them coding, they do a lot of coding, you know, but things that they they've got to do, and we hope that we can enhance and help the teachers, their classroom teachers, because a lot of the schools don't have everything they need for STEM. And so we are hoping that we are a complement to their classroom, so that we're just an extension of the things that they want to do, but not not necessarily have the time or the equipment to do. Um so that's how we go.

SPEAKER_01 16:24

So you m stir up within them interest in a category that they may have not have been exposed to at home, at school, in their daily lives, so that the classroom can uh support that interest. And then that is how they learn how to think. Is that did I get that right?

SPEAKER_00 16:46

That's right. Okay. That's right. So we want them to, you know, we're not going to tell them what to think, but we can tell them how to think. And a lot of the basic your inquiry methods are just that. You don't tell the the child the answer, but you give them enough information that they can take it and figure out the answer. And that builds their confidence too, in that they made it and they they did it and they got the answer themselves and wasn't given the answer. Uh, we have one that we have Egbert. The the kids love that. They've loved that for I mean, I've been in in as a director uh since 2016, and Egbert is their favorite. Egbert is the experiment that we do with a raw egg, and Egbert goes in onto a space shuttle, and then Egbert sent down a line really, really fast, and and he lands on the moon a little rough. Okay. So what they've got to do, they're given a hundred dollar budget. So there's your math again, and they have to go in and with that hundred dollars buy all these items that could make something to go around or, you know, to go around the raw egg. Now, this is a raw egg, and make sure that he lands, you know, if he's gonna land have a rough landing on the moon, he'll be okay. And if they are successful, if their team is successful, we give him a bracelet that's my egg bird survived. What we do is when it does land on the moon, we we get it out of the out of the apparatus, out of the rocket, and we take it and we open it up very gently to see if he survived. And there are no cracks, then he's great. He's gonna get it to walk on the moon. If not, then they have the opportunity then to go back, get another egg, and produce, maybe ch change some of the things that, you know, they think about it. First, we have their team think about it, which is what all teams like the Bill Cars or anything that that's engineered, they go back to the drawing board, so to speak, and they look to see what they can change to help their egg survive this next time. So that's what they and they love that. They love doing that.

SPEAKER_01 19:13

I love that. I can I'm totally in my mind seeing a picture coming together of the kids building confidence and the teamwork. It's all kind of making sense. They're basically getting tricked into learning and and the teachers love it because you're supporting their efforts and taking a little bit of their you know daily task load off of them and putting it in a community, in the community's lap. And part of that community is the the airbase. So I I I love that so much. For the 2024, 2025 school year, is there already a sense of what schools will get to participate in that this? Will it also just be Title I schools, or is there a hope that it'll be more?

SPEAKER_00 19:57

Well, we're focused on the on the Title I schools. So what we have been doing is we had an agreement with uh the previous superintendent and the base commander that we would go through all of the schools, the elementary schools, which I believe there were 32, that we would go all through all the 32 elementary schools in Excambia County. That was our what we agreed upon. And then we would start over. But in the meantime, we could fill those with other other interests. You know, we we'd like to look into the homeschool groups. They have to thing is is that going outside of Excambia County because of the distance, they have to be there for five hours a day. And sometimes that creates an issue with them getting back to school and leaving on time with the buses. So but we're working on it. We're going to see if if we can expand the program to outside of Excambia County, pick up some, you know, areas of of interest that don't necessarily it it may not be in a, you know, the typical school, but other other education entities that are around. Yes.

SPEAKER_01 21:04

That's exciting. Yeah, because this is a pretty cool program. I mean, people are gonna want to participate in it. This particular program is just for fifth graders. Is there anything for kids that are not in fifth grade?

SPEAKER_00 21:16

We are in the we're in the middle right now of planning our summer camps, which we are going to is a week-long summer camp on base. So access to the base was a problem before, but we can work around now where they could come in the back gate of the of the base and get in at nine o'clock. So we just might have to shorten the hours, but we might be able to do a one where all anybody can sign up for it. We do have one week that we give just to the military dependents as a thank you for you know supporting us and everything. So we have the military dependents come in. We are going to offer this year in July, I believe. It may be June, this summer, a girls in space camp for just the girls. And it will be in grades fifth through eighth.

SPEAKER_01 22:09

Wow. Oh, how exciting.

SPEAKER_00 22:11

Then we have con we are going to see if and make sure that we can come back to the Blue Wahoos and do a week there of STEM, and that's a sign up too for anybody outside in the community.

SPEAKER_01 22:25

If they would want to sign up for that, if they would want to sign up for that, how would they go about that?

SPEAKER_00 22:31

The best way to do that is through our Facebook. It's Starbase Pensacola. We put out that we've got our, you know, summer camps available and it's an easy sign-up. We need to know about, you know, the kids and what age they are. But it would be the ones that are coming into fifth and going, well, specifically for the girls' camp, it would be the ones going into fifth and are going into eighth. So our other camps, we do fourth through sixth grade. And so we keep it to the those coming into fourth and they're going into sixth.

SPEAKER_01 23:08

So perfect. Well, thank you so much for sharing about this. This is very cool. And I'm so happy that in a town that is so military proud, that there is a way for the community to engage in a really meaningful way with the base.

SPEAKER_00 23:25

Well, I'm proud and happy to do it, and I'm glad I'm here. I mean, this is wonderful. I mean, when the kids look at you and say, why is this just for five days? Why can't it be for more? You just want to know that you're doing the right thing.

SPEAKER_01 23:39

You're on the right track. Thanks for listening. Be sure to subscribe and share. Voices United in Education is a production of Scambe County Public Schools.