 Hello and welcome back to the sports biomechanics lecture series and as always supported by the International Society of Biomechanics in Sports and sponsored by Vicon. I'm Stuart McCurley-Naylor from the University of Suffolk and today I'm joined by John Drazen who is a postdoc at the University of Pennsylvania but perhaps kind of more importantly for today's topic. John is really an expert in outreach or using biomechanics for STEM outreach and engaging youth in biomechanics so yeah within that he's published papers on using biomechanics for STEM outreach and this year he was actually awarded by the American Association for the Advancement of Science with their early career award for public engagement with science and yeah John is also the STEM director for the fourth family incorporated and I think one quote when I was digging through Twitter earlier that summed it up quite well there was a quote from the National Biomechanics Day account that said John is the living definition of combining human biomechanics research with scientific engagement while keeping STEM fun for young athletes so I think that was a better quote from National Biomechanics Day than I could have come up with as an intro myself so I thought I'd steal that but yeah I'll shut up and I'll hand over to John who can tell us a bit more about his work engaging youth in biomechanics thank you. Alright thank you so much Stuart it's absolutely wonderful to be on with you today thank you so much for organizing this awesome speaker series at the end of the presentation we'll talk about who's coming up next and to be included in a lecture series with Dr. Walter Herzog is absolutely stunning and amazing and it really speaks to the breadth and impact of this program so thank you to the sponsors by Khan and of course the International Society for Biomechanics and Sports. So today I will be talking about this general theme of don't preach to the choir and how you can use sports and biomechanics and sports and sports science to engage new populations of youth instead. So briefly what am I going to be talking about today I'm going to first talk about how I got into STEM through sports science then why STEM outreach through sports is important. The development of over the past eight years of the fourth family STEM program which is why I am where I am today and then emerging community engagement and academic research and then we're going to end with a call to action for sports biomechanics to get involved in their communities through youth sports programs. So the thing that's really exciting about talking to this group is that usually when I say this at an engineering conference that I hated science when I was growing up there's almost gasps but it's true in high school I didn't really find science or math very interesting because the perception that I had was that there were these really brilliant guys from like 60 to 250 years ago who were absolutely brilliant and they got these wonderful facts and understandings from on high and they were so smart that I could never reach their level and then someone else came along and invented the most scientific thing in the world which were textbooks and they took all this knowledge they put them into textbooks and then my job as a science student was to sit back and just be in awe of how smart these people were and I was very frustrated because there was like this single direction of knowledge where I felt like science was a body of facts and the way that we interact with science until we get to a high enough level is that science instruction focuses on studying the results of other people's research and I'm a big Carl Sagan fan and one of the big things that he talks about is that communicating the act of science and the way that we find these answers is more important than the facts that they produce and even understanding what a scientific fact is and what it took to get there is very important so as someone with their doctorate at this point I always joke with my students I can tell them what science is because I have a voice and they have a voice but in my in my view and I haven't really found this to be wrong scientists ask and answer questions about the world that they personally find interesting and the big thing is that when the public engages with science they sit there and they look at they they see some cells right and they're looking at different cells and the public's like I don't understand this and the scientists have the prerequisite knowledge to sit there and think like understanding the way that these cells are interacting with each other will help us cure cancer or all of these other conditions so they have all of this background on why this is interesting but the public doesn't necessarily at the same time you have engineers who are building things like this terrifying raptor robot and the public says okay this is science this is engineering but like holy henry I'm never ever gonna be able to make something like this so why even try but the thing is that if scientists ask and answer questions about what they find interesting I'm a huge basketball fan I've been loving the NBA bubble and I'm really curious what happened on this play this is the play from the NBA finals last year that literally ended a dynasty okay we're Kevin Brandt ruptured his Achilles all right and the thing is that the beauty of sports biomechanics is that we are one of the only fields that directly can answer this question that millions of sports fans care about and millions of kids wonder about so we are very uniquely positioned um so the thing that's really funny is that I was at my parents house a few months ago and my mom found something um this is uh my certificates uh from when I think I was nine as a football player and this brought back a rush of memories because when I give all these talks I always lead off by saying I hated science and then when I was looking at this I remembered the fact that when I was a nine-year-old they had a John rule which is where I asked so many questions I was constantly asking like why do we do this why do we do that um and it got to the point where I had to run a lap every time I asked a question and the thing is that I ended up learning a lot about football and getting in really good shape okay but the thing is that I was curious about what made someone good at football and I wasn't finding those answers unless I talked to my coaches and that is being a scientist and unfortunately by the time I got to high school I kind of lost that a little bit where I had all these questions but your coaches would sit there and be like what why are you telling me to get to the backside for a rebound and the coaches would be like because you have to and you're like why and they say go run the lap all right and the beauty of science the beauty of sports science is that it can give you answers to those things and the thing is that I um as a high schooler I was very fortunate in the fact that I had a former college athlete as my physics teacher and he was able to authentically engage with me on the science of sports and in contrast to a teacher who looks at me I'm six eight you can't see it we're sitting down or virtual um but the thing is that I used to have teachers all the time sit there and I would get like an 85 on a test in like calculus or something like that and I'd have a question about it and my teacher would sit there and say well like calculus is a lot like free throws you got to practice if you want to be good at it and I sit there and I'm like you don't have to make a basketball analogy to me like I have an a in your class just answer my question um and I found that phenomenally frustrating and it wasn't until I met this physics teacher who was able to sit there and authentically engage me in sports by introducing me to this thing called biomechanics where I sat there and I realized that I have a bunch of questions about basketball and science is a simply a way to rigorously approach the question and then find an answer and then also tell me how much I can trust that answer so one of the things that I've realized is that that is not present in a lot of the ways that we teach science and it's really important because diversity in the STEM career fields is really really important okay um because there is severe and by the way I know this is an international society for the sports biomechanics I'm the focus mainly on the United States science because that's what I've really researched I apologize um but um the the URM population um by 2050 we are going to be a majority minority country and yet black and Hispanic individuals only make up um 11 percent of the STEM fields and there's people in the old guard who'll sometimes say well you need the life science to become a scientist but the thing is that in order to be successful in our society and in order to make money and support the family and kind of socioeconomic mobility um STEM is the way to do it so excluding these groups and its underrepresentation is a huge huge huge issue that we need to address head on as a country because diverse groups um do more creative science they have more impactful science and there's also a huge issue of equity in this so we need to do whatever we can to make these career fields more accessible so the question is how does someone become a scientist or engineer the thing that predicts success in really any activity is something called individual interest which is where it's a long-term intrinsically motivated passion for something um however everybody starts off as situational where you're a little kid or you're an adult and you sit there and you have a short term experience or something where if I do this I someone I will get a reward so it's extremely motivated and what we want to be able to do is we want to figure out how to transition um people from having a situational interest in STEM because they have to get good grades for their homework or something like that all the way to individual interest which predicts long-term STEM activities so there's an entire transition where you go from situational interest to maintaining situation only you have these repeated exposures to emerging interest with a perception of the person changes towards these activities and then that morphs into uh individual interest and the thing that's very interesting is that the situational and maintained situational that takes place inside the classroom also known as the formal STEM education um but the thing that actually makes someone into a scientist is the informal STEM educational experiences which is where they're actively seeking opportunities to engage with these materials um and one of the really beautiful things that I hope everyone takes away from my talk is that there's a huge bond of STEM education literature that can help you formalize your thoughts and understand these relationships so this is a really great paper by Maltese um if you I'll put I have the bibliography um later um so future STEM workers are recruited through the um participation in the STEM pipeline and as I just said informal STEM experiences are associated with major hand college so traditional formal STEM activities include being in science barriers building robots and having them fight uh being in a science lumpiae or doing um or voluntarily seeking out opportunities to research on a college campus um among many others um but the way that this is framed a lot of times is that informal STEM participation as a high school student lead two students having a STEM major however the thing is that this is just the tip of the iceberg because you're not going to sign up for these programs if you aren't interested in STEM and you're not going to be interested in STEM if you're not aware of how great it is um so um this this kills when I talked about uh chemical engineers so we can uh we can look at this as almost a activation energy like a uh an energy threshold that needs to be met to be engaged and this STEM intensive outreach can't engage these students who don't have a pre-existing interest so what what out of school activities do youth voluntarily participate in there's a really nice study by Larson in 2016 um where they talked about or where they did a survey of over 2,000 students and nine percent of these students participated in STEM related clubs and what drives this participation there's a nice study um where what they did is they did a survey of boys and girls um with over a thousand students and they looked at what the odds were of them participating in a voluntary STEM activity and for males you can see that if they don't have a science identity um they cannot engage in these materials or these opportunities um but there isn't really that much of a difference between middle and high level interests and um however among females in order for them to participate in these STEM activities they have to really embrace their science identity which is very difficult for certain groups and I'm going to get into that in a second so what does popular culture tell us about STEM identity? First off that it's minority second that it's done by geniuses and third that like I absolutely love hidden figures um but hidden figures spend a lot of time talking about the protagonist being this absolutely brilliant person from the cradle um and I didn't think I was brilliant when I was growing up maybe some people do but I would argue that I'm an effective scientist without sitting there and um taking high school classes as a fifth grader or however old she is in the movie um and these types of these types of representations are very damaging so how do these stereotypes impact student beliefs and science? So there's another nice study by Starr and Leaper and they had a questionnaire where they assessed they evaluated like how much they've how much these students valued STEM and how competent they felt that they were at STEM and then they saw how much these students bought into genius stereotypes and then nerd stereotypes about science and then the nifty thing about this is then the students reported their own beliefs about their own identities within these two stereotypes and now so for the genius stereotype what they found was that students who thought that they were geniuses and thought that they were that scientists should be geniuses the more they thought they were a genius the more likely they were to um think that they were good at STEM and on the other hand for the medium students there wasn't much of relationship but for the students who don't think that they're a genius the um they thought that there was a very negative correlation between STEM the their belief that they could do STEM and how and how important being a genius was for being in STEM so these stereotypes matter on the other hand for nerdy okay um the students who thought that they were nerds and scientists for nerds there's a positive correlation but once again if you don't buy into the nerd stereotype um you don't value STEM so these representations are very important and they are very impactful and so sport the reason I'm talking about this is that sports science and sports biomechanics provides an alternative stereotype for what science is uh when we're promoting this talk a bunch of people were retweeting and then um responding to my pin to tweet that was talking about how athletes need to talk about um their identity as athlete as both scientists and athletes and I have like three or four people sit there and respond like oh like I'm my phd in biomechanics and I was on the Canadian Olympic team for running and I'm like oh my god that's amazing we need to highlight this and then like I'm a division one basketball player studying physics like it's absolutely amazing like the the these representations are important all right and fighting against the big bang stereotype is something that we are uniquely positioned to fight and the thing is that because like when I was a when I was growing up when I was in high school like I really enjoyed basketball and by being introduced to sports science it provided me this really interesting and amazing career where I asked and answered questions about given movement um so after uh so after I became interested in biomechanics and sports science I was a four-year college athlete at SUNY Geneseo and I studied physics so I was a physics major playing basketball center okay um and uh for my senior capstone I had the opportunity to build my own biomechanics lab where I used like local cost force plates and like a video camera to sit there and track the rehabilitation of one of my injured athletes one of my injured teammates and it was really cool and the funny thing about this is that like I was advised by a nuclear physicist and we had no idea what we were doing um and what was really cool is that like since we didn't know what we're doing we like reinvented the wheel over the course of like a year and I learned so much about biomechanics and it was absolutely amazing and it was just asking and answering questions that we found interesting and these experiences allowed me to go pursue a phd in biomedical engineering and rpi and now I'm a postdoc in the human motion lab at Penn and without sports I would not have been making it through this entire time but so with all that in mind um one of my college basketball teammates uh john scott reached out to me in 2012 when I started my doctorate and he approached me and he told me hey john um my my basketball players suck at math and rebounding and I thought of you so I started coaching and I started tutoring and um I realized that the best way to coach my athletes was when they said why I'd sit there and say let's collect some data and then they'd be able to collect the data and then say well when jamal shoots from the left side there's a 70 chance it goes to the back side so I should probably get there or I need to box out because dr drason or I wasn't a doctor at that point but john's coach drason sat there and he showed me like about mechanical advantage on the court and then on a white board so like I will get low to box out um and so I realized and I already knew this but I realized that using science within sports was a really great advantage for what we were doing um for the actual coaching and it can provide the answers and rationale for why you're providing this guidance and on the court or in the classroom I also realized that bringing in and capitalizing on our shared experience and passion for sports was an excellent way to teach kids about science um so I still remember this play um pretty much uh LeBron is ending uh Jason Terry's life um so we came into the classroom and for the school tutoring program and one of the kids was just like yo like why like how how's LeBron able to dunk like that and you can't because we're both the same height and I'm like well like it could be differences in muscle and then we ended up having a really really detailed conversation about muscle mechanics which was absolutely amazing and I actually got to the point where I was sitting there on the white board drawing out Acton and Myason and talking about the crossbridge cycle and these kids definitively were failing high school biology and I didn't even know how impactful that was until I came in for the next tutoring program and there were these two kids like talking to each other in the back and like they were like doing this thing with their hands and I go into the back and I'm going to yell at them about paying attention and then I realized that the kids were sitting there and they were they were explaining to the student who missed the class how Myason climbs over Acton and then at the end he goes like yeah and that's why LeBron can dunk like he does and Dr. Dresden can't and these students like we're covering the biology of life and yet they're sitting there and they're talking about almost graduate level muscle mechanics topics because they're interested so there's a huge opportunity to use movement science especially within sports to engage these kids so with all of this in mind um how can we use this on a wide scale and why is this important so from that same study with Larson 15 percent of the kids participated basketball another 47 percent of the kids participated in another sport okay so the thing is that sports has so much of a larger reach than these traditional programs so why do we want to use youth sports they have a huge reach in the diverse populations and careers in that work I've had a lot of conversations with high school administrators and high school teachers and they sit there and say our kids can't learn science because we don't have enough money to pay for robotics kids and I totally get that and I totally feel that but the thing is that we can use sports as an excellent venue to teach science and there's a huge population that is rabid fans of it and want to get better um and then also almost every place has a youth sports league you don't need to reinvent the wheel you can approach a local youth basketball program and say hey like I'm a sports scientist I would love to sit there and help out with coaching and run a sport science run a sport science clinic for all of your teams and then boom that's 150 kids self-selected on an interest in sports rather than an interest in science so you're really broadening the pipeline also one of the big things is that youth enjoy sports and expect to work hard to improve all right so the thing is that like you sit there and say like you look online and it's like hashtag grinding you know and it's like somebody sitting there and saying I put up 10,000 shots this this summer because I want to get a d1 scholarship um one of the big things is that these students are intrinsically motivated to get better at sports so if you can show them and authentically prove to them that sitting there and um understanding biomechanics can improve their performance that can be folded into that huge work ethic that they have and everyone who's watching this probably understands that the NBA and all these other professional sports leagues they pay top dollar for sports scientists um and the thing is that the reason why they do is because it's a competitive advantage and we can teach these kids how to do it themselves so they're not just great basketball players but they can also go into these career fields if they don't make it to the NBA and then finally participation should be predicated on a pre-existing interest in sports rather than STEM all right so the thing is if I sat there and if I if I said I'm going to have a robotics club everyone can come I'm going to get 10 kids if I said there and say I have a free basketball program who wants to do it I'll get 100 all right and those 100 kids aren't self-selected I'm like hey I want to learn about science so in summary sports science is an authentic relevant introduction to STEM for potentially millions of years all right and I just touched on this but STEM has become an integral part of first force so we have somebody like Zach we're doing by the way I'm a huge like basketball fan so all my examples are in the apologize for any of the uh both American and real football fans but this is gonna be all basketball but one of the big things I'll talk to the students about is that like this is Zach Levine one of the best dunkers at the NBA he tore his ACL and he's literally on Instagram um uh highlighting and documenting his recovery an engineer built this machine a lot of mechanism analyzed it to show that it was efficacious all right and then when he's recovering he's going into a sports science lab to see how he's doing all of these things demonstrate the importance of sports science within sports and then there's also a huge entrepreneurial movement like there's this really cool um company called um home court where you can do like automated training so they're really it's really permeating throughout this entire thing so how can we authentically incorporate sports in the STEM education so the thing that used to upset me when I was a kid um was that they gave me a basketball cannonball problem all right and they sometimes they calculate the initial starting velocity to make it so they make sense of the hoop but the thing is that that is the exact same question as this cannonball only with like a sugar coating of um it's a sugar coating of sports all right so this doesn't help a basketball player but on the other hand um we can use examples from professional sports science and analytics whether it's sitting there and talking about like using heat maps or talking about bomb mechanical training techniques or explaining the technology that allows these uh professional sports to collect these data so we need to make it authentic so I'd say use science as it's meant to be used to ask and answer interesting questions some questions that you can ask that I literally run month-long programs on is what makes somebody good at basketball how do we measure this how do we understand our fun so you can sit there and you can use these types of general questions and then have it so that youth athletes can tunnel into their specific interests and people might say oh well like if you run a robotics club you know that the kid at least is interested in learning c plus plus like how do we know these basketball players are going to be prepared to do type this type of stuff and if anybody is a basketball fan or a 2k fan they know that scientific data collection and analysis has begun to permeate youth basketball culture so I know a bunch of division division one players who are fixated on improving their measurables for the NBA ground there are an NBA 2k which is like one of the most popular sports video games in the world and actually has its own popular professional league they represent player stats using things like radar graphs and then also using things like key maps so what we can do is we can create low cost alternatives to engage and empower these students with these schools pertaining to their own play so we can build things like low cost sports sites but this is one of the big things that I do we can take those data that we collect and then put it into forms that they find engaging this is another thing that we do um they'll talk about in a little bit and then we can sit there and develop tools to be able to measure and visualize things like shooting performance so this is a key map that I actually used for our 2017 MIT Sloan sports analytics paper that actually won best research paper which was absolutely amazing um and so here's a very quick example of how you can use this type of stuff so kids are fascinated with like who's got hops how high can they jump and the thing is that if you look at this from a physics perspective it's actually very straightforward if you design a device that can detect when someone's standing around you can measure hang time so pretty much when they're on the plate the signal is high and then when they leave the plate the signal is low and this is the technology that's behind all these jump pads that a lot of that fun performance can like get pardoned like seven hundred dollars for so you can use you can build your own device and then actually have it so that the students understand how to calculate this type of information so you can use this you can use this to teach or make relevant the conservation of energy where you can actually walk through how to use algebra to build the device to measure something that you care about and then you can solve the conservation of energy to solve for the final height and then you can use a one deep kinematic equation and then solve for takeoff velocity and then you can combine the equations to get the thing that relates hang time to vertical jump and one of my favorite things about this is that the kids realize that they can cheat by increasing their hang time artificially by holding their knees up and then the kids start literally screaming at each other about science i'm not kidding they literally started sitting there and saying you're cheating you're lifting your knees up that's artificially increasing your hang time and you're cheating and the kids like why would that cheat and they're like it's a bunch of math do you want to learn about it it's hilarious um and the thing is that they get invested and it's a way to make these things relevant so i have a bit so actually there i actually have a paper that you can find on my google scholar describing how to build this um but i actually i've built probably 50 of these across the united states at this point um and pretty much it's made out of wood it has an arduino in it um you use a voltage divider and a force sensitive resistor you put it inside the plate and um it costs about $50 and making and actually making the device is part of the activity um and the teachers also actually really love it because they sit there and they they feel like they're doing science um and the thing that's really cool about this is that you just need to go to home depot and buy the stuff and then you can build it very easily um and the the next thing is that like so for example i've used that plate um summer league uh with the tomorrow stars foundation um so for the past three years i've gone out to las vegas where i helped develop the court science uh classroom program and the kids really love making the equipment and then demoing it for people so and the cool thing about this is that all of these students that you're seeing in this photo are recruited to the junior mda program um in las vegas so these kids are basketball players first who are now learning about step and then the students actually get to go onto the concourse uh during the mda or during the summer during the summer league games and we actually have a booth when they measure the vertical jump of the people on the concourse of the sports fans and they're explaining how the equipment works and they also get to decorate it you can see all these different things and you can see that you can actually get into engineering design and consumer um engineering design like consumer facing consumer center engineering design because as you can see here the students sat there and they realized that they should put feet on the plate so that people knew how to use it and where to stand um and this is just one example of the way that we've used this type of stuff so over the past 40 or over the past eight years we've engaged over 10,000 students in stem so one of our first programs one of our first series of programs is that up until this summer and due to coronavirus we've actually run um basketball camps with mda players uh in albany york so um we had marcus aldridge quinn cook immanuel moody and last year we had rodney rodney begruder and the big thing that we did with that camp is that we had a sports science station where each camper would get their own customized sports science reports um we also have one summer programs where we sit down and do like engineering design um leading the context of sports for college and older high school students um i previously mentioned the court science classroom at mda summer league in los vegas and then also we have a really great 7 plus mc program with the aclumbia biomediculture and department um and they've done an actually wonderful job implementing our approach and we have a bunch of our student volunteers working there as well so i just want to get into a very quick case study um on the development deployment and evaluation of a campus-based sports biomechanics program and i did this with a great team at rpi of uh david core diva chan and amy loya so the question that we wanted to ask is that on kin sport programs brought in access to the stem pipeline by engaging youth without a pre-existing interest uh in stem and so we developed a sports science clinic that was hosted as part of national biomechanics tech so what we wanted to do is we wanted to replicate the feel of the mda rookie combine um and have it so that they got actionable feedback um these athletes got actionable feedback so what we did to make sure that it was as authentic as possible is we actually recruited student athletes from the men's and women's soccer and basketball teams to help develop the program um and they helped design the tests the equipment and actually ran the clinic which was amazing um so in order to test uh actually to actually do our experiment we recruited both stem interested youth and sport interested youth that's the same equipment so our sports cohort um we contacted athletic departments and we recruited the men's and women's soccer and basketball teams for two local urban high schools um and then for our control which were the stem interested kids um we actually like we had a group of um we had a consortium of stem outreach programs hear about the event and request to join the program and participate so it's a really nice control to sit there and say these are the people who would be on campus anyway the way that we assessed the program is that we collected demographic info pre-post surveys and we had a 15 question liquor type survey where we characterized interest in sports sports science and stem and then we calculated domain averages to form true liquor um items so before the actual program we had the college athletes spend eight weeks learning the engineering design process um and they designed built and tested their own sports science equipment so as i said earlier i'm not a soccer aficionado um so i really actually needed this um content area expertise to help us with this so i asked them a question i asked them what makes a soccer player elite because i honestly don't know and the soccer players they actually spent a bunch of time thinking about it and they identified foot speed and then as an engineer i said how can you build a device to actually measure this and we came up with this idea called the toe tapper so the athlete the student athletes went in and they um designed the device which ended up being a wooden box we had other athletes help build these natural electronics behind it and got to actually test it so um if you can tell me um when it breaks so right there so they're doing they're actually doing uh fail early fail often and they actually had to go back to the drawing board a few times but by the end of it they actually developed a device that they use in their practice so and you can see they're actually testing that they built this off of the drill that i guess soccer players do where you practice your foot speed by touching the top of a soccer ball um but they ended up building five or six of these um so all of the youth participants ended up participating in the sports science during um national bomb mechanics day and all of the programs and all the important was actually run by the college student athletes and all of the um visiting high school athletes um building their own sports science report where they entered in their information and then they actually directly compared it to the averages of the college athletes so the athletes so the information that they were getting is actually actionable because these students want to play in college a lot of these students think they're going division one and if they're not out performing a division three player they they they need to think about what they can do to get better and these reports came along with suggested training approaches and also we always invite these students back year after year after year so they can actually see how they get better throughout the predict throughout the participation in the program um so now on the results so the breakdown of the participants was that the STEM cohort was very female which is great um but it was predominantly white whereas the sport cohort was significantly more diverse um so uh there were the same numbers of african-american as white students which was like a really big achievement um in terms of making these programs more accessible so the first hypothesis from the study was that the STEM cohort would have a higher starting STEM interest relative to the sport cohort and what we found was that um the STEM cohort uh like 96 percent of them agreed that they wanted to study STEM in college whereas you can see that the mode response to the sports cohort was no when we asked um all the students how interested are you in final varsity sport in college 70 percent of the sports cohort would agree actually I think it was 80 percent of the sports cohort agreed um whereas all of the STEM students were like no the majority of the STEM students said no so we can see that these two groups of students had very different starting interests so our second hypothesis was that the sport cohort would exhibit a larger increase in STEM relative to the STEM cohort and as you can see here the STEM cohort did not have a change in interest we are already excited about it now they are more excited about it um and this is a very good finding because what it's saying is that when you have these programs come in what you're doing is you're not expanding access you're retaining interest so a lot of these programs they're accelerating students towards careers in STEM which is phenomenally important but we also need to have the chance to engage new populations and on the other hand the sport cohort we had a statistically significant increase in interest in pursuing a career in STEM where the mode response shifted from disagree to agree which is a non trivial finding and then finally I mentioned those domain interest of parameters and we found that that an interest that the interest in science or the interest in STEM was moderately and statistically significantly correlated with an increased interest in sport science which so the appreciation for sport science is driving or is partially correlated with the um with a change in interest in STEM which highlights the potential of this approach and on the other hand um we had a non statistically significant drop in um the STEM cohort which I jokingly say the the STEM people found out that you can use sport science for sports and uh they didn't like it but it wasn't statistically significant um so in in summary recruiting youth athletes and teaching STEM through sports broadens access to the STEM pipeline for diverse use and so we talked about this before where there's this required interest in STEM for engagement and the thing that's really cool is that sport science provides a new way to look at these things and a new way to bring people in so you don't need to sit there and say I want to be a robotics engineer when I grow up and then sign up for a robotics club you can sit there and say I want to go to the NBA or I want to go to the WNBA I want to go to the Premier League and then we just need to sit there and provide them with a pathway to show how a STEM can help them with that so the key takeaway is from um the talk are uh that asking and answering student-generated questions is really really important and that that can work both in a virtual space or in the real world space and also in the virtual space that we find ourselves in right now so um this is a photo from the the Marcus Aldridge camp um and one of the things that one of the biggest things that we did there was that um as I said we provided these radar charts to the students so they'd sit there and the athletes they'd sit there and they would go through the entire sport science section of the clinic and at the end they got this report that we generated that sat there and compared them to their peers um and so they would know like I'm one of the best 17-year-olds at sprinting but I need to get better with my upper body strength and all of this stuff was actually using DIY sports um science equipment that was actually built by these two students and the thing that's really exciting is that this guy is now studying PT and this guy is now studying mechanical engineering um and he's the he was the high school captain of the of the basketball team and he was the high school captain of the soccer team so the thing is that these are like these student mentors that we're working with are the people that these kids look up to and what we what we did is we also provided them with like references for like how does this look like in the NBA and so as I said we we had our camp cancelled this year due to coronavirus um and very fortunately uh we we have absolutely one of my wonderful friends who I've met through sports science and my STEM outreach work is a guy by the name of Dan Briskine who works for the Toronto Raptors um in their business analytics department and Dan has been a volunteer at a bunch of my programs where he's come out to Vegas with us he's come to Albany to help run the camp and when he got locked in for coronavirus um he actually built a absolutely wonderful website um with this student um by the name of Aditya Ori who's the most precocious 16 year old you're ever gonna meet so pretty much together this organization called sports science and they built this absolutely phenomenal website that allows us to do virtual outreach with kids where we use NBA data to explore and answer ask and answer questions in basketball so for example if you want to go purely biomechanics um you can look at NBA combine data and then look at look for correlations between NBA combine results so you can sit there and you can look and see okay so people who sprint faster jump higher so maybe I should train at both of these things okay that's very superficial but um we can get more into that later and then you can also use these radar plots where you can compare stats among NBA players and it's all just centered on asking and answering questions and the really beautiful thing is that there are all of these people in the sports world and in the academic world who have these wonderful expertises and you can find and make these collaborations it just has to be centered on asking and answering questions um another thing is that to do this type of programming you need close community partners you can't sit there and you can't just parachute in and say I know what's best so um all of my programming is done in very close partnership with fourth family and one of the co-founders John Scott so I might regret putting this photo in a YouTube but this is a video or this is a picture from us as college basketball teammates our bus broke down so they brought us home in a limo um and when I moved back into the area I'm linked up with John Scott 2012 I started building fourth family the fourth family STEM program with him in 2013 I started working with him um at RPI on academic research in 2014 by 2016 we'd assembled an absolutely phenomenal team of mentors and now in 2020 we're working together flying around the country um to do all of these different programs um so the thing is that I didn't create the STEM program I sat there and I worked with very closely with community members who can speak to the specific issues that are facing in the community recruit people from the community to help run the program that is a very very important part of this and then um a big thing is that um STEM education outreach can serve as an opportunity for both STEM outreach and academic research um so biomechanics research um suffers from some of the same issues as STEM education so STEM education is very good at reaching the students who want to um who want to get engaged in STEM and at the same time biomechanics has some of the same problems um they have small sample sizes um how to use some convenience sampling it's very difficult to do prospective studies on the development of um like on human development and chronic entries so the thing is that we can sit there and at fourth family we've reached like we I have been in the room with five to ten thousand kids and this is just pictures of things that we did the year before the country shut down and you can see we have this massive reach into um these communities and active communities and the thing is if we can develop low cost tools to sit there and collect data at these heads of events we have the potential to do large-scale representative prospective studies and finally uh you really want to empower athletes to serve as STEM mentors um not because it not only makes for better programs but it makes us the athletes can follow our path into STEM through sports and this is a this is an example of a program where the student who's explaining the jump plates that I just described to a very large group of kids he's literally jumping over my head for a slam dunk I'm six eight he's jumping over my head so when these are the mentors and role models that you're empowering that makes it so that the message is crystal clear that sports and science help each other so ways to get involved um I'm running a virtual outreach competition for the American Society of Biomechanics East Regional Meeting um registration is free and there's prizes and potential funding for the best submissions so I would love to have everybody come to the ASB Regional East Meeting um just google it and you'll be able to find it um visit fourthfamily.org or email um John Scott which is jscott at fourthfamily.org to volunteer with our organization get involved in National Biomechanics Day and then feel free to um reach out to me via twitter uh at sports to STEM and all of my stuff is on Google Scholar so I'd like to thank my STEM Ed collaborators at RPI Amy Lohan um David Kaur and Diva Chan uh both John and Joaquin Hoke who run uh fourthfamily and co-found the organization my funding at Penn which is the Pennport Arrakta Fellowship um the Tomorrow Stars Foundation who's our community partner in Las Vegas uh my very patient postdoc mentor uh Josh Baxter um and Todd Holfish um who's our lab uh lab engineer and then all of the support staff at RPI as well as all of the students who have worked with me to make this program possible so um I'd like to promote the future lectures as well brilliant thanks John for doing my job for me there at the end as well perfect um yeah thanks ever so much for that I think as you said you're not going to be interested in STEM if you're not aware of how great it is I think that was one of the quotes you used and yeah hopefully sports and basketball in your example is a really great way of actually showing people how great STEM can be um yes I thought that was really interesting thank you um and yeah I think if anyone's got any more questions then type them in the live chat on youtube or if you're watching it back another day then if you just leave a comment then we'll try and get an answer otherwise just contact John as he said on the last slide um yeah for the first question though John can't actually come carrying on from John question man Drazen as you were age nine gonna reverse it around and yeah you can be the one answering the questions this time but um yeah hopefully people realize this is me playing devil's advocate and not actually my own views but if I were a selfish academic only interested in progressing my own career then I guess why what's in it for me everything you showed is kind of benefits for the youth what are the potential benefits for the actual academic conducting this so the way that I think about this um and one of the reasons the the way that I internally justify spending a bunch of different time on this rather than like my pure science work is that um if as scientists we want to sit there and expand um the realm of human knowledge and one of the biggest things that I've thought about and realized is that I'm a good researcher like if I cut 10 hours out of my week or if I return the 10 hours a week that I do this to my research I would be overall more productive maybe I'd get another paper out or something like that but the way that I think about it is that if I can inspire just five students who otherwise wouldn't have become scientists to become researchers um their career work is going to be so much larger than anything I ever could have done so the thing is that if we can sit there and get more people into the into the field of asking and answering questions we can sit there and amplify our we can amplify the scale of human knowledge much more effectively yeah I definitely agree I think yeah it's still potentially requiring people to be selfless and kind of I guess do things for the the greater good of science and the community well and also um one of the big things is that um and I sorry I have a lot of thoughts on this uh the the thing is that if you look at if you look at health outcomes in the United States if someone gets their high school degree or college degree they're going to have less lower back pain like and so if you really want to solve a lot of the biomechanical questions that we look at um the science is phenomenally important but in terms of actual actionable things that you can feel good about um sitting there doing educational outreach we'll sit there and reduce we'll make it so that people know how to take care of their bodies and educational attainment is correlated with better musculoskeletal health so that's another point and then at least in the United States the broader impacts criteria is very important for the National Science Foundation so um all of these different things can help you with your grant writing as well perfect very good answer and yeah I think prevention's always or mostly cheaper than the cure um but yeah it's following on from what advice could you give to somebody who's maybe watched this and thinks I really want to do that in my local area but I've got no idea where to start so so the number one thing um is find somebody like John Scott um everything that has been built out of this is comes down to mine and John's relationship um because he moves in a bunch of different circles that I don't and vice versa um and the thing is that sitting there and if you if you work in your local university and you advertise a sport science enrichment program you're going to have professors kids show up whereas if you go to the local YMCA or community center and talk to their basketball program director and say hey I would like to do this with you what do you think you're going to get a much wider swath of people so don't reinvent the wheel in terms of recruiting subjects or recruiting participants look at what organizations exist in your local community that engage with the population of kids that I share an interest with and also one of the one of the key points is that make sure that you authentically love the topic that you decide to talk about um make sure that like because one of the biggest things is that I've had I've given this type of presentation um and I have people ask me like well what are you doing for the girls why don't you do a dance program for the girls and I sit there and say okay number one two different things messed up about that one I have girls who I've worked with who will who would eat you up on the basketball court they would cross you up and you'd fall over so basketball is not a guy thing okay basketball can reach anybody all it takes is a love of basketball but number two um I don't think you've ever seen me dance and it would be super duper obvious that I was pandering to those students and I was sitting there I was looking at them I was saying you're too dumb and I would never say this but like the the implicit message is you're too dumb to be taken seriously so I'm going to sit there and pander to you and do a dance thing even though it's super duper obvious that I'm only talking about dance because I think you'll like it so so the thing is that sitting there and like one of my favorite programs I've ever helped with was a knitting class so there was a there was a graduate student in my fellowship um when I was at RPI who was like uh who was like a uh microbiologist who loved knitting and she sat there and she looked at my basketball stuff and she was like oh I want to do something like that and I was like well what do you like to do she's like knitting and then she sat there and she created an after school knitting stem club that had four four people who showed up every single session and learned about algorithms using knitting and the thing is that you don't sit there and think knitting is going to be a great way to reach kids at an urban high school but out of the 1500 students there were four of them who were like I've been waiting for this my entire life and then they sat there and they went to an after school program for like two years that was all centered on the very specific science of knitting so if you love if you love football if you love non-american I'm just called soccer I apologize if you love soccer do soccer if you love football do football if you love dance do dance if you love video games do video games but the big thing is that don't do something that is inauthentic I think yeah I think that's excellent advice and just from watching you talk for the last hour I think it's obvious to everybody watching how passionate you are about both the stem outreach but also basketball and I think yeah it definitely comes across and it's so much easier to engage students or anyone really and what you're talking about when you don't put it on well and the thing is that like if I weren't doing the stem outreach stuff I'd be a youth basketball coach like I'm being serious like I love playing basketball I love teaching basketball I love coaching basketball so the thing is that I would be doing this anyway and I'm just bringing my expertise as a scientist into it that's I guess really that's exactly the same as what we're saying about the students or the youth themselves as well but it's just tied to you where the whole point is that they would be doing this anyway so you're using that as the vehicle to engage them whereas yeah the point is that you would also be doing this anyway and yeah just all around work for you there's that there there's that old joke if you love what you do you don't work a day in your life um like my favorite thing do is play basketball and then um and then like talk talk smack about the nba and now I just do that to help kids so it's super interesting yeah I think that was um that do what you love and you won't work a day in your life it's about kind of the main bit of advice my dad gave me over and over again that he just kept saying if I had my time again that's what I do so yeah that's definitely super cool and then the only other thing I was thinking is along the lines of what you were saying about reach out to people that are already involved or organizations and programs that are already ongoing from a biomechanics perspective like you mentioned in one of your slides tying it in with something like National Biomechanics Day will also be beneficial because you've got a supportive infrastructure there they do marketing and there's posters videos promotional materials that you can use so again if people think I don't know where to start then a lot of the National Biomechanics Day stuff can be beneficial there as well yeah for sure and then also if you're a graduate student and you work in um and if you're trying to sell your PI and you're doing an outreach program if you sit there and say I'm going to do something for National Biomechanics Day there's like 500 other people doing it at the same time do you mind like it's a really great way to start the conversation yeah definitely and um yes there's a question on youtube that's along similar lines of one of the questions I'd jotted down towards the end you mentioned the virtual outreach website that you've well along with others have kind of developed during lockdown and coronavirus what's the scope there for others getting involved either say someone in another country who wants to involve their students in it or other educators or academics that want to use that so is it so it's courtscience.ca and I'll post that to twitter and we can also post to the comments but it's a really great website and it's a lot of fun to use and one of the biggest things is that like we've done virtual stuff like with the court science app and we've done it with other stuff as well and the biggest thing is just having a authentic question that the kids are interested in we've done we've done a lot of outreach programs virtually where it's it's just me on a powerpoint and we're talking about Achilles tendon rupture because the kids like and that isn't the first class that we do that's like the third class where we've had an entire argument about whether or not KD would have left for the nets if he hadn't ruptured as Achilles and then the kids like why do you do that I'm like so by the way I'm going to kill these tendon rupture researchers so let's do this and and it's really what the important thing is the question the platform can make things harder or easier but the but the best platform isn't going to get around it isn't going to make up for deficits in thought and planning and engagement okay and yeah just following up again on so if that website can anybody everyone can use it so everyone can use it so um the the the two people who coded the entire thing uh Dan in the detail they are really excited about um having more people use it as a tool brilliant in that case yeah we'll definitely share that you know they really want to have people use it um and we're actively looking for people to like we'd love to do soccer we'd love to do all these different things um and once again the big thing is that basketball is in our real house so so basketball has been what we've been working on but if people want to get involved to help develop that website further they'll be amazing brilliant thank you um and yeah just again before we finish I think we're about at time there like yeah just thank you ever so much it's been really useful but I think personally as well I've really enjoyed it and I think it's something that I know we were chatting before but it's a resource there that people can go back to because I know next time I plan any outreach once schools and universities are back to a bit more normality it's something I'll go back and watch again and think what can I do differently how can I maybe channel some of this so hopefully I'll provide a similar resource for others yeah no I'm really excited thank you so much for having me sir no worries thank you thanks for speaking no