 Hi, I'm Mike Predko, Chief Designer for Mometix, and Mometix is a company that's mission is to interest and excite students in STEM, science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Mometix's roots go back to 2001, where the founders started a robotics activity at the Ontario Science Centre. Over the next 10 years, we worked with over 12,000 students and their families, and working with over five generations of robots. From what we learned, we decided to create a company that was just devoted to this activity. And the reason for doing this is quite simple. 40% of the jobs in today's workforce require advanced math and science at the high school level. The middle school interest in STEM, the students about to go into high school, their interest level is at an average of 17% overall, 26 for boys, and girls are at one third of that at 9%. This is reflected in the high school enrollment rates for the different academic levels in math and science. Over the 10 years that we were working at the Ontario Science Centre, we learned a number of things. One of the first ones being is that people are very positive about robots. It's something that interests everyone. Over my life, what I've discovered is that everybody is interested in robots and dinosaurs. That's something that when you say either one, you catch people's attention. And I like to joke that the reason why I'm working with robots is because I don't know how to make dinosaurs. It's a great way to bring, when we talk about robots, it's also a great way to bring parents into the educational process. It's a very positive activity where parents can work with their children and learn with them at the same time. I just cautioned is that parents will be a bit nervous because they are learning something new and will be concerned that their roles as parents may be served by an activity where they're shown to be not experts or whatever. So when you're working with that, you want to be careful about that. But when you are successful, it's really amazing. And we'll talk a bit more about that as we go through here. But over the years at the Science Centre, we've worked with four generations of participants in our programs. And it's quite an amazing thing to see great grandparents on the floor with their great-grandchildren learning about robotics. It's a very powerful activity. When we talk about, I talked about us having five different generations of robots. And one of the things that we discovered is building a robot tends to be a problem. We talk about having a workshop where we say, or an activity where you're going to build a robot. When the robots have been built in almost everyone's minds, they take the position that they're done. They've built the robot, and that's the end of the activity. And it's unfortunate because while there is some learning in terms of the mechanical aspects of it, putting something together that's a positive experience, it should only be the beginning of the journey, and not the end of the journey that happens. The other aspect is, and we talk about different products that we want to work with in terms of building, such as we did work with Mindstorms for a bit, is Mindstorms is an incredible product. It really is amazing. But when you look at the robots or the models, robots, whatever you want to call it, the Lego site, what you very quickly discover is you try to create on your own is they can take up to 20 hours to build. So not a really long time for a kid to do it. Now a number of them will be successful at that. And what we found is at the end of the process is they've done it, again we have the same thing with the build, they get it working, they like to see it work. But they're not interested in taking them apart again, there's something that really kind of surprised us. And Mindstorms can be a problem in the classroom or anything that's being built because it does take up a lot of space when they're partially built. They've got to be put together and work through that. Also problem we talk about building, building can be a problem depending on the robots because a lot of times when working with that you're working with chemicals in terms of glues, lubricants in some cases, sharp tools, knives, screwdrivers, clippers, it all can be a problem. And then hot tools, namely soldering irons. We found that we just will not solder with students as we work through them. It's a distracting and somewhat dangerous activity. Then when we actually have a fully assembled robot we really found a lot of really magical things happened. Children or students were much more willing to try different activities and experiment with the robots. Much more so than with the robots that they had built themselves, which seems counter-intuitive but again it goes back to the ideas that when you're told the activity is to build something and you've built it you're done. Also having a fully assembled robot means that you have more time to teach concepts and a fully assembled robot allows you to pick and choose your concepts to make it age-appropriate for younger students. Another important issue that we learned and are learning again as we'll talk as we get through this video here is the importance of having homogeneous computer systems when you're working through this type of activity. When you have one type of computer system you're going to get the same problems. You're not going to have different issues with different programs than previously loaded on the computers. Just something to watch out for. In 2001 we formed Memetics as a start-up as I said to interest and engage students in STEM. We took what we had learned from the previous ten years as well as the five generations of robots we used from the volunteer program to create our own robot which we call the Jade Robot. This robot here as you can see it's called a track differentially driven robot. What makes it unique is that it has all the sensors integrated into it again going back to the need for a fully assembled robot. It has all aspect light and object sensors. It also has a user interface built into it and this user interface allows someone to experiment with the built-in programs of it to see how robots work. Light following, line following, object avoidance. As well as using it there's several different ways of programming the robot on the robot itself without using a computer and these programming tools are actually very sophisticated. And finally this allows you to configure the robot for different operating modes as well as connecting the robot up to a computer using a Bluetooth interface for downloading programs and controlling it remotely. The robot can also be programmed using USB but when we did our initial user testing during the design process we found that users overwhelmingly preferred Bluetooth. In fact we couldn't find anybody who preferred USB because it means that there's no hooking up a wired connection. You're just putting the robot down on the floor running it, there's a problem stopping it, changing it, working it. It's actually a much more efficient process for program development for the robot. One of the things is you can program the robot in scratch. This is something, I guess going into it, being an engineer, being someone who had worked a long time, really felt that scratch was something just for an introduction to programming and robotics. One of the things I've discovered is it's a very very useful tool at the professional level for creating programs that are very sophisticated but can be created and edited very quickly without a lot of the frustration of dealing with a text-based language. One of the things you might be looking at is when you look at the picture of the jade robot is that there's no shell on it. As a startup, of course, we were told that we had to have an iconic plastic shell for the robot. What was interesting and maybe a bit ironic was the industrial design process that we worked through was to take their designs to 200 customers, in this case we identified teachers as the customers, to show them what the robot could look like and what would they prefer and what would they like to see in it. It was fascinating for us because along with that we took a hand-wired prototype robot to show the user interface what we wanted to do with it. Literally all the teachers pointed to the hand-wired robot and said that's what they wanted for their students. They didn't want something that was covered because they felt that there's too much technology today that is hidden, it's essentially arcane to the students and it's somewhat scary. It's having a product that has the componentry visible that the students can touch, can see that it's labeled. That is actually a very positive aspect of the jade robot and one that we've never had anybody go back and say that was a mistake. Having said that with the plastic cover is the jade robot is very tough and I really recommend any kind of robots being used in the classroom should be tough. Well you don't want them rolling off tables, they may, but you'll also have kids putting them on their bodies, having them collide and generally having fun with them and that's something that should be encouraged with a robot that is tough enough to survive this without any issues. As I said, even though the componentry is visible on the jade robot, it actually is a pretty tough little beast. Since 2013 when the jade robot first became available, we've been bringing it and program materials to various schools in the greater Toronto area. In that time we've worked with about 3,000 students of varying grades from grade 2 up to grade 12. In saying that because as hinted above, we discovered the greatest age group for the opportunity for what we were doing for changing their attitudes was the middle school grades 6 to 8. In these, this is the age range that studies show kids are making a decision about what they're good at as well as what do they want to do in their careers. So it's something that we can, that, you know, we really, it really is the right point for making that difference. Also is very interesting for me was to see how well girls performed, especially relative to boys of the same age. You know, trying to remember back when I was a 12 to 14 year old boy, I didn't see any real difference in maturity or skills of girls at that age, but there really is a big difference. And this is an opportunity or this is a situation where girls will perform at least as well as boys and give them a very positive feeling about STEM and their ability to succeed in that. We also talk about grades 6 to 8. We also, in Ontario, we have different programs in the curriculum that we can work through here very efficiently. For grade 6, this is the Earth in Space Science Strand. And working with this is introducing the Jade Robot Programming and going to a cumulative project having the Jade Robot being used as a science probe looking for water on another planet. This was done during the spring of 2015 when the Curiosity Rover was discovering water and showing water on the Earth's surface. So this was actually very relevant and a very positive activity, one that they can work with. For grade 8, robots work very well for the system strand, explaining the interrelation between the physical world through mechanical devices and sensors leading back to control systems and how they work and how you create things that respond in a purposeful manner. A big part of this is setting up these programs with a strong cross-curricular component. Grade 6 classes, while we were working through there, we were working through grid and matrix lessons and math. Having a cumulative project in both cases brings in an English component as well as something that they can research at. We also focus on the soft skills, such as project management, teamwork, and problem solving. Art is something that robots actually excel at and is something that gets students very excited. They have a lot of fun. And again, it reinforces a lot of the things that we're talking about before. If we talk about the math in terms of the timing and the distance being moved for drawing, for the science, and how things actually look, how arcs are produced on that, it really is great to watch how the students get excited about this. As I said, we worked with over 3,000 students over the last couple of years in various classrooms. And I wanted to kind of share some of the things we learned. For the pre-high school grades, we found that students were most successful when they worked in teams of two. This was something we had investigated in the Ontario Science School, a science center programs that worked with their science school. And we worked with robots, with a single robot, with individuals or teams of two, three, and four. And we found that two is the most positive. And that's something that we're working with here as well. For high school students, a ratio of one robot to every student works best. But the work that is being presented to them is much more advanced. I talked about the importance of having homogeneous PCs. And really, things work best when you have the same PCs with the same operating systems. And this is something that just simply is not possible in today's classrooms. For that reason, I highly recommend, regardless of the system being used, that sometimes spent in the classroom understanding the systems, which ones work best, and the procedures before you have any students present with you. To keep kids interested in presentations, I found incorporating characters from popular culture to be helpful in catching the students' eyes and holding them there. I've gone through a number of different cartoons and their characters, and found that Futurama works best. Amazingly enough, I learned that Lego Harry Potter should be avoided because it distracts the students too much. The results that we're seeing are amazing. We are changing students' attitudes towards them. We survey all students, taking the 40% number of jobs that require advanced math and science as our target. We found that boys' interest in STEM goes from 26% to 62%. And we're really gratified to see that girls' interest reaches 63%, bringing them on par with boys. These results were borne out with two all-girls grade 8 classes we worked with in the last school year. Before a program, 25% of them were enrolled in advanced math and science for grade 9. After the program, the remaining 75% changed their enrollment to take advanced math and science. When we ask students on a scale of 1 to 5 if they would recommend the program, we get an average of 4.7 or better. Typically, robots in the pre-high school grades are only brought out to students as an enrichment or club activity. This is really unfortunate because doing this only interests 17% of kids that would be considering this type of activity to begin with. All students can benefit from this and gain a new appreciation of STEM, encouraging them to learn more about it in high school and consider it as a career. It must be recognized and emphasized that the purpose of these robotics programs that I'm talking about here is not to turn everyone into mathematicians, doctors, or engineers, but to give them a different perspective on STEM as well as give them some practical experience in it so that they can consider it in their future lives as well as use the skills and knowledge that they gain in their later careers. I should also point out that the programs that we're working with are for all students. This is not something that we're just doing as an enrichment activity for a few kids. It is something that we are doing for all students and seeing these tremendous results. I thank you for listening to what I have to say. I'd love to talk to you more about this. If you have any information about what we're doing, if you have any questions or comments, please contact me. Again, thank you for your time, and I look forward to talking to you.