 Tyler is a final year engineering student at Massey University. He was the lead organiser for the Successful Technology Summer Challenge, a holiday program focused on getting higher student engagement in STEM. I'm sure we don't need to be reminded that that stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths. He's currently researching what makes programs like this successful. So thank you. Thanks Claire. Hello everyone. So this is Tyler. We'll do a bit of a double act. Basically I'll go first and then Tyler will talk. But it may be that we have a difference of perspective on things. Me working in a library and Tyler being an engineering student. It's like, what? Bound to be differences there. So yeah Tyler, feel free to chip in. If I misrepresent you and then I'll feel free as well. For those who've just come in, we've just started. There are plenty of seats. Thank you. Okay, so we'll be talking about technology programming. And by programming we don't mean as in sort of programming code, but learning programs in libraries. So I'll be representing the kind of library perspective and then Tyler will be talking about it from the engineering perspective. And then we'll share the story of two highly engaging programs from 2015 and 2016. Tech challenge was this mutually beneficial partnership between Massey University School of Engineering and Palmerston North Library. During the talk we'll be talking about three problems that face libraries and hence the world. And then how those three problems can act as a kind of catalyst for quite a wonderful solution. But first I'd like to just acknowledge the team. We've got three of them here. Jamie's at the back, sorry to embarrass you Jamie. She's waving her pen. Sean is over here. He's always the guy with the coolest t-shirt, just always. And of course Tyler. Warwick and Harley, sadly, aren't here with us. But it really was hard work from all of those people. I didn't do any of the hard work. I just got to do the fun kind of stuff. So the three problems, the first one is for public libraries and for those of you who are in libraries or museums or archives. We're almost any organization. You're feeling this pressure from technology. Digital technology is bringing about this kind of pressure. We need a 3D printer. We need to do virtual reality. Oh no, it's augmented reality. Mixed reality. And there's that kind of pressure to do this stuff. On top of, it doesn't replace our traditional services. This is on top of what we're already doing, like these traditional services. And so in the previous decade it was all about free wifi and free internet at libraries and the transformation that that brought about. Now it's more about maker spaces and 3D printers and also about highly engaging STEM programming. How are we going to do that? And so there's this kind of pressure that is being brought to bear. And I think with especially news of closures of libraries in abroad and the pressure that we're feeling on budgets, makers feel, oh, we have to prove our relevance and that's part of that pressure. And we sometimes turn to technology as a way of trying to prove our relevance. So this kind of leads to a second pressure maybe, which is, so this desire to deliver these highly relevant programs to do with technology can sometimes lead to, well, it can expose that we just don't have the digital skills in-house and that certainly is happening with us. I'm sure it's happening in your organization as well. And so this was something that Sarah Kennedy addressed yesterday in her talk that often graduates are leaving their courses and getting a job in, say, a library. But they're not really equipped to do this kind of thing and that just is a real problem, but the desire is there. And we're talking about basic digital skills but also the more advanced digital fluencies and just that wonderful affinity with technology that some people seem to have and that we don't seem to have so much in our organizations. And not to mention the so-called 21st century skills that we all need to be masters of now as well to develop programs that include those. And there's a third problem and that is we don't always understand why we're doing these things. We just feel the pressure and we're doing it and we're trying to learn and trying to catch up. But why are we doing 3D modeling, for example? So this is something that's a screen grab from one of the Mac workstations that members of the public can come and use at the library. Why are we doing 3D modeling? This is something that Tyler should be doing. He's the engineer. Why are we doing it in libraries? And so we kind of don't really understand the why of all of that sort of thing. But these problems and these pressures can lead, and I think they can be a catalyst for the development of some really nice solutions. And so last year, Sean actually set up some 3D printing workshops with schools. And rather than trying to do it all himself, we invited in school teachers and their whole classes into the library, into this tech environment. And then that allowed for this sort of staff development in a kind of pressure cooker environment. And Sean's nodding his head, because that's probably what it felt like, because suddenly he was the learning support in this classroom and had to know how to do all of this stuff. And did a fantastic job. And there was this amazing level of engagement that just struck us was, wow, something's happening here, incredible engagement. It was because we allowed the teacher to be the teacher. And so staff like Sean could be the facilitator in that environment. I think that also this sort of lack of in-house skills can be a catalyst for developing really high-value partnerships. And this is kind of where Tyler comes in. These were engineering students one year ahead of Tyler. Their fourth year engineering students. They had a problem, and we had a problem. We had four 3D printers, and we kind of knew how to do some basic stuff, but they seemed to break down all the time. And these four engineering students were trying to finish their final year project. And they were making this astonishing machine that had 78 3D printed, highly technical parts. And all the 3D printers up at Massey Engineering were being used. And they said, can we use your 3D printers? And we said, yes, please. We put them in a public environment, a really public space in the library, and we said, go for your life. And pretty soon the whole place was just swamped with chip packets and pecans. But also kids and families, like little kids dragging mom and dad, come and see what's happening. And it was so exciting to see that iterative design process as they did the 3D design. They did the printing. It didn't work. They redid it and redid it and redid it till it worked. And we thought, well, magic is happening here. What are the ingredients? And it was really that we had engineering students and technology and members of the public and especially kids. So this leads to the third, I guess, solution. So the problem that I mentioned earlier was why are we doing this stuff? Like why do we care? Well, libraries, museums, archives, galleries, why are we caring about this stuff? And so around about that time that all this was happening, the science communication conference happened in Palmerston North. And one of the speakers said, hey, this is a real problem. 75% of primary school kids are loving STEM in schools. And then something happens in the translation from primary to the NCA choices. And it's going down to 25%. And this was kind of borne out as well as we started talking to Massey Engineering. They were saying, yeah, like we're actually struggling to recruit enough students into these kind of subjects. And this sort of corresponds with another really interesting one, which is that there's this sort of boy-girl gap as well, which is also roughly 75%, 25%, choosing engineering. And this is just a really good blog post on core education just about that. And so we started asking the question, well, why are boys coming to these programs and girls aren't so much? So yeah, so that's kind of how Technology Challenge was born, was around that. And so we talked to Massey Engineering. They had a problem. They couldn't recruit enough kids. And they definitely couldn't recruit enough female students. And so they had a problem. We had a problem. We got together. It became a partnership. It was really mutually beneficial. And this is kind of where Tyler comes in because it's around about this time that Tyler's professor put out a call for a student to work with the library on this program. And yeah, so Tyler, take it away from here. Cool. So yes, I'm Tyler. I'm not really from the glam sector. I am an engineer. And I thought I'd obviously point out the obvious. I'm drastically younger than many people. Not only in number, but also in look as well. But that's all right. Yeah, it's a bit of an interesting one. It's really inspiring to see quite a few people older than myself actually technologically savvy. It's quite bizarre. But it's an awesome environment to be in, nonetheless. So where I jump in is with this Tech Challenge business. So I thought I'd just tell a story about what we did or what myself and some others did. And hopefully it sounds pretty cool. So, Technology Summer Challenge. So the first one was presented to me as pretty much what will happen if we get an engineering student, library staff and a bunch of kids together and try and make something happen. So we decided that we would run a program over six weeks and it had 12 two-hour sessions. So we had 24 hours in total. And we basically wanted to get these kids doing projects or doing a project called the challenge because project or school is not cool. So it's a challenge. And so we got them to build robots from scratch over six weeks. So basically the stuff we sort of taught them or how it sort of worked was we gave them a scenario to start off with. So the scenario for the Technology Summer Challenge was that of civil defence. So there had been an earthquake off the coast of Himatangi, Palmerston North was in ruins. The civil defence was scrambling. There was a tsunami coming. And they needed to make a robot that would fulfill certain criteria that we presented them as well. So the criteria we gave them was one, it had to fit through a certain dimension gap that was sort of to make sure they didn't build anything stupidly big. And then secondly it had to carry a camera and record the whole process. So that would go inside a building, see if anyone's in there in danger or in need and then it would come out again. And then the third thing was it had to survive a drop test. So we would pretty much run it off a cliff and see what happened. Just because kids liked that sort of stuff. And so we gave them this scenario, gave them this criteria and decided to sort of do lots of mini challenges that build into this big longer challenge. So the sort of stuff we covered was, we sort of covered soldering, we covered like printed circuit board manufacture, components, like electronic components, 3D printing and design, so there's some soldering, prototyping, construction, all contributing to this much longer challenge over a long period of time, this six week course. So it was really involving and then we finished with a finale. So here was a break, we had a session where we just broke a bunch of electronics. That was our electronics learning session. It was quite fun. So then we finished with the finale. So from my perspective I just sort of juggle the idea of meeting the library's needs while also meeting the university's needs. And so part of that was having a finale that was held at my university, at Massey, where the kids got a tour of the place to see how awesome engineering is and hopefully they'll end up doing it. So we finished with that finale. And so that was a technology summer challenge and it really inspired me because it was the first time I had a job that didn't really feel like a job, I was just playing around, it was really fun. And so it inspired me to actually do some research into this. So as part of my final fourth year project I conducted research into what makes certain outreaches successful, what factors contribute to its success and how we can measure its success. So I came up with these five factors. So the five factors were like a real-world context. So the scenario we sort of presented, hands-on experiments, which the kids love, peer-to-peer interaction and project-based learning. We also had parental involvement, so interacting with the parents as well is really important. And lastly, a key mentor that's very committed, or several key mentors that are committed. So with that in mind, we designed the technology challenge, which obviously just wasn't run in summer. So we had the technology challenge, which was a smaller version of the technology summer challenge. It ran over four weeks. And it involved less electronics and more physics, which sounds boring, but it was actually really cool. So it was a rocketry theme, so we gave them the theme of the scenario that Rocket Lab in Auckland, who's a local company making rockets, was exploring hydropowered rockets and wanted to see how they can integrate hydropowered rockets, like water-powered rockets into their own systems. And so basically there was a real ramp that way to say, kids, let's make some bottle rockets. So we ended up designing bottle rockets and doing the same sort of system where we did smaller challenges that all added up to this final challenge. So we explored things like aerodynamics. We actually went over the three laws of physics, and the kids actually liked it, which was awesome. We did 3D printing and design. We went through the scientific method several times, so make a hypothesis, do a test, iterate, iterate, iterate. And we also did a lot of construction, and this was like a space man challenge as well, where they had to stay dry while they did it. So some 3D printing and design. And similarly we ended with another finale as well. So... There we go. So our finale was held in a much more public space this time because it wasn't so much partnered with the university other than just me running it. And so we held it at... and we also couldn't do it inside because it was rockets. So we did it in the square in Palmerston North, which is a very open public space. And if you can see here, that is actually a rocket taking off. So that's pretty cool. The parents involved, so that's ticking that box of getting the parents involved as much as you can. And so I evaluated this program and also reflected back on our other program and that all contributed to my research. And so we had a couple of learnings from running these two programs. So what did we actually learn? Firstly, we have this... this method of where the library facilitates a STEM program. That, to me, was one of the key aspects. Leith talked about it a little bit where there's the problem that the library has this stuff, but some of the times they don't know how to use it or if they do, they don't know how to use it very advance-ly, right? And so that led to the next time where you get expertise from schools or tertiary education. Like myself, I'm not an expert, but I can use 3D printers reasonably well and stuff like that. And so tapping into those expertise around your local city or whatever was part of that fundamental knowledge. And then thirdly, the design with the five success factors. So those were a real-world context, so developing that scenario for the kids, tying it into what they're actually doing in life. Hands-on experiments are getting them to just play and tinker and do things themselves. Lots of peer-to-peer interactions, so getting them in groups, changing groups, making them interact with each other and also the project-based learning. So doing a challenge over a long period of time. And then also parental involvement. So involving parents as much as you can. It's difficult with these sorts of programs to involve parents because a lot of the time it's run during the holidays and trying to find that time where the parents will come is really difficult. So the way we sort of solved that was just doing these big finales held from 5.30 onwards on a Friday or something, and then it really got parents coming and they'd come pick up their kids and the kids and they'd come see what I've made, and they'd come along and that's always good as well. And then lastly, having a key mentor. And I sort of looked at mentor because when I looked at the literature and stuff like that when I was doing my research, a key mentor was one of the one of the more important aspects or it was said to be the most important. But the problem was it had so many different definitions of what a mentor was. I sort of just defined it as normally when I write it I write mentor like this because it had things from like a caring and loving adult to like a highly skilled, educated expert and stuff like that. So a mentor to me was just someone who had these characteristics where yes they loved the kids, yes they were educated in their area and yes they were just hands on with the kids good role model and just taking part in what they're doing. And so that's essentially what we learned and that's essentially the tech challenge and the tech summer challenge. Both of which were in my eyes and based on an actual reasonably scientific evaluation were both pretty successful. And I think I missed it before so I just quickly we did an evaluation to the first challenge so the technology summer challenge and we got a couple quotes from some parents and some kids. So I'll just read these out just to give you the vibe of what the parents and the kids were feeling at the end of the program. That was from a parent. Thank you so much for providing a great opportunity for young people to try something new to learn new skills and to meet others that like to learn. And then secondly from a parent as well thanks so much for creating such a positive, challenging and collaborative initiative in Palmerston North. And then lastly this is easily my favorite quote from one of the kids says the program was awesome do it again because I will keep doing it until I'm too old to apply. And so that's the technology challenge and if you guys have any questions Leith will answer them. Tyler does kind of fit all of those definitions of mentor. You know he's a caring and loving adult as well as a highly trained expert in his field as well. And I guess that's really mostly the reason for the success is to get the right person to be the partner. So well done Tyler. Good job. You mentioned before about library staff not having as many skills. What was the transference of skills to the library staff from what sounds like an amazing project? Yeah I don't know if Jamie or Sean would like to answer that question. Jamie's, yeah actually both of them I think they're best to answer. So when we had the first Tech Summer Challenge I was part of a digital team on the job so I had a lot of website kind of skills. Didn't know how to solder, didn't know how to build anything. So every time we had a two hour session I had a half hour forehand and I said to Tyler, show me how to do this really, really quickly. So I learnt how to solder. A lot of this stuff doesn't take all that effort. It just takes a little bit of interest and if you're interested in something it doesn't take too long to pick up a small skill. Then you do the next thing and then you do the next thing and then you do the next thing. By the time you've done half a dozen things you suddenly realise you can actually show this to somebody else. So we got to the second one and I felt a lot more confident with helping the kids to do certain things. All it takes is a little bit of your own interest and maybe a little bit of your own time. You can learn whatever you want to learn. Sean's also going to answer. I just had a question about what's next? What's next for the library? Okay well sadly what's next is probably that Tyler's going to zoom off and do something else. Totally amazing. Unfortunately not in the library. But we would absolutely love to do more with Massey. We've got such a good relationship with them now and we kind of know a lot of the professors. So we want to do the next thing and I think Sean and Jamie and Harley and others just want to do the next one. We don't know what it's going to be but we'll just keep kind of pushing in this direction because there's such a demand from the parents and from the kids and something you may also have noticed in the photographs was all the little siblings, the little brothers and sisters coming along as well and they were just amazingly interested and it was just really cool the way that the team and Tyler handled the little siblings as well like planning little mini challenges for them to do as well so they could all line up and launch their own bottle rocket as well. And I think it just really kind of magnified the positive impact because that whole family kind of went home with such a buzz. Anyway I'm not really answering your question but anyway over to Tyler to tell you what's next for him. So for me personally I'm actually have moved to Auckland so I'm not necessarily going to be doing much with the public library but I'm going to be I've this is not really related to anything but I'm going to be a teacher so I've done a bit of a career switch from engineer and so I'm still an expert in my field but I'm going to switch over to do teaching so I'm actually going to be a maths teacher at Mount Rossville Grammar in Auckland I got into a really vigorous graduate program and called Teach First NZ if you want to look them up and so they cover a lot of my costs and stuff which is awesome so that's what's thanks for me. But I would love to because this is a two year program I'd love to be able to make an impact on STEM education because I don't think it's necessarily run all that great in schools that means stepping out of schools and going into more outreach programs and just making a national and hopefully global impact they'll be awesome but that's a pretty long term. Any libraries in Auckland want to grab Tyler while he's up there I can highly recommend the experience no more questions I think we're just about done then thank you sorry I'm kind of taking over the role of the chair did you want to say anything