 I'm really excited. We're really lucky to have the next speaker here, Michelle Dickinson. So Michelle has a background in materials engineering and materials science. She's really moved on from her work in the scientific disciplines of the lab that she runs at the University of Auckland and is stretching out around how we can connect science to the world through communications and education. She does fantastic work for women in science, otherwise known as Nano Girl, and really excited and welcome to the stage, Michelle Dickinson. Thank you, Rebecca, and hi, everybody. First of all, I'm going to start with apologising. I have three education conferences to be at in three different locations today. You're number one. It means I'm not going to be around for the social time, so please feel free to contact me with any questions at the end. And I will leave a bit of space actually to ask questions right after my talk. I always feel guilty that I can't be here, but I have a big education conference that I'm keynoting at tonight in Auckland, and I have to fly to a government education meeting this afternoon. So sorry. It's a busy space right now. And so I'd like to ask you all a question, and the question is, who is your favourite teacher? Just have a think back to your past, and there's usually no more than two that you can remember. Of the 30-something teachers you may have had in your life, there are usually one or two that stand out as your favourite. And they don't stand out as your favourite because it was your favourite subject necessarily. Mine was an English teacher. I'm terrible at English, but he was passionate, he engaged, he made me love the subject. It wasn't about learning, it was about being. And typically, if you think back to your favourite teacher, it's about the emotional connection you have with that person and their love for their subject that connects you to the topic, whether or not you are good at that subject or not. And so I feel very passionately about how do we get our kids excited about the world and everything by being passionate teachers? A teacher is just somebody who knows a little bit of something. I'm not talking about qualified teachers, I'm talking about everybody here who can pass on something to somebody else. Our neural connections are changing. In 1972, the average age that a child communicated with digital technology and typically then it was television, was four and a half years old. Today, the average age that our children interact with digital technology is four months old. We usually give our child an iPad from a very young age and they learn to swipe. And I have seen toddlers swipe people because they're boring because they have no concept that this swipey thing doesn't work on objects other than their iPad. So what's going on here? So I've been doing a lot of studies, no true story. You've never had a toddler swipe you now you know why they're doing it. So I'm really kind of interested in this and there's this backlash on are we giving our kids too much digital technology should we be concerned, look I think it's just happening and I think that we have to deal with this. What we are seeing is it's changing the neural pathways for the brains of children. It's making them disseminate information very quickly, they're used to flashy lights and quick information and they have a much shorter attention span. The correlation studies show that the more digital technology a child has up to the age of five, the less attention span they have from the ages of five to eleven. It's not necessarily a bad thing, it's only a bad thing because we teach things in an attentive way. We have our classroom set up to be our classes whereas our kids have a two minute attention span before they need to move on to something else. And so our question is are we teaching in a way that we're training our kids to learn? We now have this new neural pathway for our babies that they're growing up with yet we teach in a very old style of way. So Nana Girl, I didn't pick that name. So I'm a nanotechnologist and I've been doing quite a bit of public speaking and what I found is that children weren't used to seeing somebody talk about science in a way that they understood and they definitely weren't used to seeing a girl do that. And a lot of girls started writing to me. If I showed you the fan mail that Nana Girl gets, handwritten letters, she got an email yesterday that I sent out to the world, she has become a celebrity who's not involved in sport. So our kids want to grow up to be like their sports person and we only give them celebrities that are either in music or sport and they've never really had somebody outside of that box. And I realised that they were hungry for that. And Nana Girl, it's ridiculous. Kids send me their birthday gifts. I wasn't able to make it to their party so they'll send me the little treats and a bit of cake. Nana Girl gets way more mail than I do. And the kids name me. So Nana Girl just sort of stuck. Kids are like, hey, it's Nana Girl and that's sort of become this thing that kids are aspiring to be like. She's a scientist, she does cool stuff, she does things up, she's not intimidating, she doesn't use long words, she explains things. I do quite a bit of kids TV as well as regular TV. And I realise that our kids actually have a hunger for science but are also very intimidated by science in the classroom. So how do we educate what is traditionally an intimidating mail subject in a way that everybody can understand? And I realise I have this massive girl following. And this is interesting because I'm an engineer and I don't work with girls and I don't play with girls and I don't see girls in my environment just because there aren't many girls in engineering. And yet, whenever Nana Girl does something in public like I do public science events, it's 80% girls coming. And this is not the demographic of what we see regarding studying. I don't see lots of girls studying engineering science maths. And yet at this age, so up to the age of about 12 or 13, girls are following Nana Girl everywhere. And it got me thinking about what's your learning style. There are four basic learning styles and you have one that you are strongest at. And so there's visual learning, there's audio, do you listen? R is writing, do you write? And kinesthetic, do you touch? So I learn through visual and touch. I like to touch things, pull them apart, see them, shape them. And what I found is school was really hard in the science subjects and maths. And that's because they're typically taught by theory. You write something on a board and then you're supposed to remember that. I didn't have hands-on maths and I found maths really difficult because I'm a hands-on learner. And so what I've been really trying to do is create a situation where you teach and you learn in all four styles. So you typically teach in the way that you learn. And what I found is that I was taught by males who are theoretical visual, theoretical auditory learners. So they speak at me and expect me to remember that and understand that. I want them to throw something at me, I'll take it apart and I'll give them back and I'll be like, oh, I get it. And what I've realised is that we're losing a lot of girls, especially in the science subjects because we don't teach it in a way that's hands-on and visual. We're very much like, here's a textbook, write down this mathematical problem, derive it and what's the answer. And there's no final application for them to figure out where that fits in the world. And where do you live? In the UK this year, so September last year was the start of that term, the UK has now changed their law so that every child from the age of 5 to 16 now compulsory has to learn to code. By the age of 11 in the UK each child will be able to code in two separate languages. We don't do that here, we don't do that in America. And we are growing up in a generation of kids who swipe right all the time, yet they can understand the technology, they don't know what's inside it. They can't code the system. I call it a generation who know how to read technology but don't know how to write technology. And so my concern is that a whole demographic of people, the whole of the UK, all these kids are now growing up being able to code in two languages by the age of 11 and we still don't have coding in our main curriculum and it's definitely not compulsory. So where you live is going to have a big, make a big difference on what your skills are in the tech sector. And how much money do you have? This is a really big question because the amount of money you have determines whether or not you have a computer at home. And if you have a computer at home it's much more likely that you're going to learn how to use computers and if you don't. So the demographic of where you live is really important. And I felt really passionately about this because I didn't come from a home that was very well off and I was very lucky that my dad bought me a computer that I totally destroyed and pulled apart but I learnt how it worked and that gave me the hands-on learning skills that I've been able to use today. So I teach engineering at the University of Auckland and my average class and this is a very stereotypical picture my average class is a white male who has come from a private school from an upper to middle class family. That is my demographic. I have 985 kids in my class I call them kids, they're 18. 985 engineers in my class of which the majority are like this. Now there are some exceptions we do have some girls, we do have some minorities but I'm not seeing these faces change I'm not seeing this equality come out I'm seeing the same proportions come in again and again and this really concerns me and what else concerns me is the fact that to be an engineer now in my faculty it's harder to get in academically than medicine and law. So we're only bringing in the brightest the brightest being those who can pass an exam really well and again we've seen that those who pass exams very well come from schools that train you on how to pass an exam and those tend to be in rich areas and those tend to be private schools. The poor kids are missing out not because of their fault not because they're not smart because the system that they're taught in is different. I want to change this model we have a shortage of people in the STEM subjects and what we're doing is bringing in more of the same. What I want to do is diversify this platform. So I'm Vaughan Rizal who may or may not have met yesterday who's the CEO of Vend and myself we bought our heads together and said this is broken how do we fix it and so we've co-founded a charity together and we have both have very unique but different backgrounds in that we both come from very poor families and at the age of eight or nine both of our parents said here's a computer we don't know what to do with this but we know it's going to be important to your future do it and we both learnt to code at the age of eight and I also learnt to solder and take apart things and we've set up this, this is tech rangers this is OMG tech and this is what we're trying to do to help change the world so that kids can have more access to technology education no matter what your demographic. So this is my childhood and Vaughan's childhood basically soldering stuff at the age of eight being creative, being hands-on learning your fingers, learning how to code in DOS this was before the internet and just generally playing around and having a curious enough nature and enough mentors that we could ask questions to this was before the internet, you couldn't just google and answer that we taught ourselves to code and we taught ourselves to build circuits and we've both become very successful around independent careers from very poor backgrounds and we wanted to be able to find those kids who came from backgrounds like us and be able to be their mentors so how do we run it? We run workshops, they last for one day they're usually all day on a Saturday and each of our workshops is crowd funded so those of you who are here, yes, stay and saw Anna give her talk we run us through her pledge me campaign and typically a workshop costs about $2,000 and we ask the public for money 50% of our places, we usually have 80 students in a workshop are funded by the public and 50% are funded by people who can afford it what that means is that we have a demographic of 80 kids of which 50% come from very poor backgrounds and 50% are able to afford to learn how to do this we also, on pledge, we offer a one for one so if you are paying for your child to come you can also buy a child for an underprivileged child to come to that same workshop too our tickets are like $50 so, for both kids so it's not very expensive we're all run by volunteers and we've successfully crowd funded every workshop we've done and we always raise more money than we need which is great because we put it into more resources for next time so the community is on board and we run them in areas that are very, very really struggling and what we do is we talk to the library network close by and we say because there's 3D printers that you can move around to different libraries and we say please can we put the resources in this area so when we leave the kids still have stuff behind we usually have a 2-year cycle on their laptops and then they put them in e-waste so I say instead of going to e-waste please can you donate all the laptops that you have that are 2 years old to this because we have kids who don't have devices and you can't practice if you don't have a device and all the companies are like oh yeah we were just going to throw it out here have this 2-year-old max are what we're getting for our kids to be able to learn them what does our funding go towards we bust your kids in because we understand that on a Saturday so we make sure that you have safe transport to and from our venue and we feed you and we feed these kids food that they've never seen before fruits and vegetables and healthy things and they complain and they whine and they're like oh I'm not touching this this is not chips and we're like well then you'll go hungry and then they see somebody else eat this beautiful piece of fruit that's organic and they're like alright I'll have a bit and by the end of it all these kids are exposed to certain types of foods that they may never had before and we explain the importance of nutrition to their brain we explain the importance of good food for good learning and by the end of it they're usually pretty young but they do resist at the beginning these are kids who brought up on fatty fried processed foods who don't have whole grain vegetables that are organic so as part of our process we're not just teaching tech we're teaching about nutrition and how it's important to run your body as a well-oiled machine which includes your intake of food and a little bit of understanding about food so what do we do we run six different workshops and they're an hour each and so the kids just do a workshop and rotate and they have ten minutes in between to stretch and run around and we do crazy things we teach robotics we teach you how to build a robot we teach you how to programme a robot we teach you all sorts of things about robots kids start with nothing end up building a robot within an hour we teach you how to code we teach you using scratch so that you can build the game flappy bird you can change it from a bird to a bat or whatever you want within an hour kids go from no programming skills to be able to write their own game and app within an hour we teach you 3D printing we teach you CAD, we teach you how to draw a shape and then we get you to send it and watch it on a 3D printer be built kids go home with something that they've designed and they've made things up, we teach science about the body currently I'm getting kids to run around and measure their pulse rate and talk about exercise and how our body flows with blood and other things and we have my favourite space the breaker space this is where you take an electronic something and you pull it apart and you see what's inside because kids aren't allowed to do this anymore if you look at your smartphone it doesn't have screws on it kids, I grow up taking things apart and figuring out how it worked we have this generation now where everything is so sealed you can't open it and so kids don't know what a circuit board looks like they don't know what's inside their phone they've never seen the inside because you get in trouble if you try and open it so we give them plasma TVs we have all sorts of things hard drive computers, we give them a screwdriver and we'll go explore and this is my favourite space because kids have the freedom to touch to be, to feel, to ask questions and to break stuff and never have to put them back together so how do we do this and what do we see our vision, this is all open source so each of our workshops now we've written the curriculum for so that anybody can run our workshop we don't want this just to be us we want this to be taken out around the world so 3D printing if you have access to a 3D printer at your library for example we will tell you exactly the free software you need to download how to do it you don't need any experience in 3D printing to be able to run our 3D printing workshop same goes for scratch we've written this by step instructions so that you as somebody who's never coded before can still mentor these children in coding so we've written this what I call a recipe book for our workshops so our volunteers don't have to have any experience you just have to have passion and if you're really stuck in trying to find the electronics we will help you do that but usually you can find a local company or somewhere that will host you that will have computers your local library you can have a 3D printer put into temporarily if you live in New Zealand and the science stuff is all kitchen science so it's, I'll show you in a minute but it's marshmallows and it's baking soda and it's stuff that you can buy without needing a permit so we didn't want this to just be ours we wanted this to have access to especially rural communities where they don't have a strong science in their school and I just want to show you some pictures so this is what the kids look like they're engaged these are kids from very poor schools usually who are getting into a little bit of trouble at school they concentrate they have a problem with kids running distractions they are totally focused these kids are currently playing with CAD images making something for the 3D printer they sit quietly we have these open source rooms open access rooms and we're worried that kids would like annoy each other if they're in different workshops they're totally focused this is a Saturday in their own time and we do kids from the age of five up they're totally focused we have a mixture of girls and boys our demographic is 50% those from what we would call poorer societies 50% kids who pay we have 50% girls and 50% boys minimum I don't run it unless there's 50% girls although all the pictures I've noticed are of boys I'm sorry so we have a photographer who just takes random shots so these are all the kids aren't posing this is just kids doing what they do we found that there's a lot of teamwork and building and what we've been able to do is never normally socialise because of their economic climates to make friends and to work together because there's no uniform because you don't know what school these kids have come from you don't know how rich or poor they are and kids are just kids when you throw them in a room together and so now we've created friendships for life with these kids from very different social backgrounds this is just them playing oh this is them printing their stuff out on the 3D printer girls helping boys helping girls there's no differential here on the gender and she seems to notice that there's a gender difference at this age and what we found is that although we gave them all assigned individual tasks everybody wanted to work together and so one person would gather around a computer and the next person would help and actually we had these teams forming just naturally all trying to find the same end to their purpose that we gave them and we have girls building robots this is one of my favourite robots to build girls fascinated in building robots girls gathering together girls actually taking over because they have a bit more of a concentration span and they're really good with some of the little finer details and girls telling the boys what to do which I love because I don't get to see this in my job usually so this is a TV and everybody's taking out a screw and they're all working together to try and disassemble this as nicely and neatly as possible because they think we're going to make them put them back together we don't but we make them take out the circuits we make them understand how their TV works at home they now understand that there's LEDs in there they now understand there's circuits in there and they've never seen the inside of a television before and as an engineer people might want to know what do you build as an engineer I build marshmallow catapults you want to take kitchen stuff this is wood skewers marshmallows, rubber band and a plastic spoon and we use engineering principles to make a marshmallow catapult and then at the end of the day I sit at one end of the room and all is who can get a marshmallow fired into my mouth wins I've never been hit by a marshmallow so many times in my life but this is engineering we think outside the box we're building we're constructing, we're making and we're eating all at the same time and then we just throw stuff at each other girls boys every age is learning to interact together and we survey the kids before and after so the kids usually that we survey have no technology at home so it's like I thought only rich kids could be computer programmers but now I see I can be one too that one always makes me cry my dad is a truck driver so I thought that's all I could ever be but now I want to do something different and never knew learning could be fun and that just goes back to those teachers who you don't you don't like a subject because of the teacher sometimes not because of the subject I learned that just because I'm not good at test doesn't mean I'm not smart and this is where we promote kinesthetic learning tests assess one way that the brain works but actually if you're a hands-on learner that's okay too we just have an assessment system that doesn't always recognise how good that is I learned that science is for girls too in one workshop we have totally changed the mindset of some of these kids from these really poor areas to just think outside the box and have hope that they can do something different that's what we're doing and I hope you would all like to join us I have two questions for you Michelle that was amazing one is looking at the infrastructure that you developed for that program what are some of your thoughts on the scalability of that specifically in mainstream education what will it take for schools to have such a lab and a space for kids to actually learn to write technology so we need to do a lot of training for our teachers to be honest the average teacher in New Zealand in technology is a 55 year old female who has not been brought up around tech so we need to do a lot of retraining and actually have schools have people in place who have the confidence to teach tech and this is an ongoing process and so I would really like to see more time and right now primary school teachers in the whole education period of learning to be a teacher in their degree get between three and five hours of science unless you are specifically going to be a high school science teacher so I would like to see more science education to as part of the degree program and also more community interaction it doesn't have to be teachers who do this if we have more incorporation from guest lectures from the community into our schools we can actually do that mentorship my second question is around food you talked about the value of nutrition and just curious to hear a bit more how you have seen what kids eat and how they affect how they work and how they think so a huge effect and actually a big goal of mine for the next stage is to be able to do growing camps I want kids to take away their seeds and understand how to grow their own crops and where they come from so we've been working with Edible Gardens to see whether we can host one there and get kids to make their own lunch and see where things come from and then we give them seeds to take home and grow their own like four or five months ago but it was born and I who know us we just stuffed up it's just incredible Hi Michelle, thanks for pushing kinesthetic learning I know in my background is definitely kinesthetic and that helped me get through to engineering school I was curious these kids who go through this and only have an hour to learn say robotics with 3D printing going home are they going home and pulling things apart are they keeping up, is there enough that they've got that structure that mindset to go and continue that learning is there a kind of program that they can come back so we make sure that everywhere we do one we hooked up with a local library so that we have the 3D printer put in for at least a month so the kids can then have more 3D printing experience there the scratch is open source so at the library we have all the libraries put in Tinkercad and things that they can have all their software and we tell them what they can and can't pull apart and where the e-waste centres are so if they wanted to do something and put these things and start pulling them apart that's cool we don't leave them high and dry and I also run something called Code Club Aeteroa which is a code club for kids which is a longer program so if they like the coding then I say this is your local code club we'll get you into this if you need a device I'll provide one for you so now you can have a formal education encoding final reflection over here thank you that was incredible I just wanted to give a reflection there's lots of maker fairs I love the idea of a breaker fair lots of e-waste let them take it apart let them see how it's done one of my sons always did that we used to go to radio check it by automatic doorbells and let him take it apart so thank you adults can totally sign up we've had more requests from adults than children and we have all the parents lurking in the corners thanks Michelle super inspiring just curious what amongst this group in the audience how can we help, what are some of the challenges or hurdles that we can be of assistance to so both Fawn and I obviously have two very busy full-time jobs on top of all this other stuff that we do we have two full-time employees right now for our charity that we don't pay and we're trying to fund them so if anybody knows of any grants we can apply for to help fund two full-time people to get all the bureaucracy and stuff done in the background that's really helpful we're always looking for volunteers you don't need to have any skills but if you want to help us we just need you for the day it's so much fun and you get to break stuff too as a volunteer so if you know anybody who would like to volunteer for this then we will run them all over the country and hopefully worldwide so please help us do that and if you know any big corporates who are donating laptops or electronics then that's also what we're after so much I could say oh my gosh you made me cry that just one thing I wanted to do to build a bridge from today to some of the conversations we've been having the previous days around getting more women involved I just really so see the importance of you being a woman that makes it so approachable for these girls to get involved, to be inspired into their gifts and into their leadership and you really understanding the ways that they can feel connected to their gifts and connected to you and feel like oh I can do this too and I think that applies to science but also so many forms of leadership and so I just really really want to highlight and honor you in this moment for being a complete model of that to engage these new generations of young women and girls to step into their gifts and into their leadership to make more 50-50 types of ratios in spectrums across the board Thank you