 Many engineers say that they want to teach STEM to younger generations. However, J. J. S. Sealeson has actually figured out how to do it. He's created Learn Through Robotics, and he's found the key to really teaching anyone anything. Let's hear all about it. All right, now I'm excited to welcome our guest onto the podcast today, J. J. L. Sealeson. I'm excited because J is an entrepreneur like myself. He is an entrepreneur and an educator. He's the founder of Future Technologies Education, as well as Learning Through Robotics. J, welcome to the Engineering Career Coach podcast. Thank you for having me. I'm very excited. So J, I'm excited to talk to you as well. You've accomplished a lot. You're a very motivated person and you're really interested in some of these initiatives that we're going to talk about today. But before we go there, tell me a little bit about your career and your background, how you got to where you are today. Well, I come from a finance background. So my undergrad and my master's all in corporate finance and ended up in a bank as most finance people end up going to a financial institution. So I worked for Citigroup, and I worked and traveled a lot. I worked in Japan and Singapore for some time and also moved to US. And then right now I'm in Utah. From the banking career, I found that there's something missing for me, which is technologies, science, particularly engineering piece, STEM. So because of my interest, I just learned by myself something that I can do with engineering, even though it was a little bit late for me because it's halfway through my career. So I got into education and started teaching and started learning through robotics in 2011 with a friend of mine called Glenn Jacobs. And then we also started Future Technology Education, another company bringing technology to children. And I love what I do. Wow, that's crazy. So you your backgrounds in finance, but you became very inspired into the STEM and engineering, you wanted to teach children. And I know you've taught many, many children. And I know you like to do it in a way where they can, you know, a hands on approach where they can see it, they can feel it, they can, I think that's a great way to learn. And so you kind of learned, you learned a lot of this on your own, huh? Yes, I really believe education has a lot to do with interest. If a person is interested, even after all the degrees and everything and experience in a career that is completely different, you can still learn. It's just getting that interest. So as educators, I think that should be our job to get people interested in what they like. Yeah, and especially children, right? If they're not interested in something, they're not going to really want to learn about it. You know, I know that I have young kids myself and I know that that, you know, it's one thing to have them read a book, but if you can also tell them a story or show them pictures and really get their interest in something, they become much more willing and able to learn about it. And I think that's something that you've kind of captured for sure. Alright, so so that being said, Jay, talk about it's one thing to talk about, you know, teaching kids and understanding maybe, you know, how they might learn. But for someone who's from corporate finance, I mean, how did you even understand how to educate people? How did you learn how to do that? Well, to begin with, like yourself, I have really young, I had really young children at the time. I have three boys. So I would come home after a very long day of analysis and presentations and numbers and play with my kids. And I found that the interest I had was actually with my kids a lot more than what I did with my bosses. I don't know what I should be saying this in a podcast, but I really don't think I had good bosses. So I had I struggled a lot with even though it's a great company, great potential. So I worked well with a lot of people, but I struggled with some of the tasks are very, very stressful tasks and long, long hours of work, and constant travel. I don't know whether you will believe me, I have traveled to 56 countries on assignments. And some of them six, seven times a year, which means every other month I'm on a plane to a country. And we did audits, we did, you know, all these things, these all fun career type jobs, when you're a single young person. As you grow a little older, when your boys are growing up, I realized that I'm not doing what I'm supposed to do at home. Instead, I'm really on a plane all the time, and eating hotel food. Wow. So that must have been I, I that made me change, do some things different. And I realized that at least my older boy, at the time, 10 years old, had a very big talent and interest in building things, and taking things apart and putting it together. And I had the same interest, even though I didn't know that. If you go to my garage, I have a lot of little little robotic kits that I used to play with in the middle of financial analysis, I would come home and that's where I would de stress myself. Then I thought, hey, this is what I should do for living. But how can I do that? So I just thought, why not, you know, get together with a group of friends and their children, and make a program where you can build things, use a computer to program a few things, and see whether we can bring education that way to younger kids. So that's how it all started, that's my statement in Utah. So that's how you started learning through robotics? Yeah. So you mentioned, and you talk about how learning through robotics offers a hands on approach. Yes. Tell us more about that. How does it work? So pre COVID, I will tell you what we did. We go to a classroom, and we bring equipment, robotics kits, sensors, motors, Lego pieces, a lot of other plastic pieces to build things for elementary students, along with a laptop, and a programming software. So kids will put together a little robot of some kind, or an animal or a man or something they like to build. And then they will configure it using a very basic programming language to make it move. So then now the animal is just not a Lego toy, but it's actually walking, it's talking, it's doing different things that they like. And it's really exciting for a child, say, eight year old, to actually make a little toy do something, and see that it happened. And that's where the beginning of excitement comes. And then they, and then we teach them, hey, these things you can do unless you do physics, math, programming, coding. So the students start to think, my, so it's not just for the classes, I had to learn these things in order to make the toy move. So the kids interest goes to a different level. I really believe engineering, particularly has to start in elementary school, not in high school, when everything is finished for them to become an engineer, it's too late. So that's why we started with elementary school. And we had huge success when we started. That's great, because I can, you know, I have a son who's 10, and I know he used to love the Legos, but now they're becoming boring to him, right? And they're missing that dynamic component of what you're bringing to the table with the coding and, you know, making things come to life. And I think that that's really, really awesome. And I also think I agree with you, I mean, I'm an engineer myself. But I didn't know anything about engineering until someone started talking to me about it in high school. And, you know, luckily, I gave it a shot. But I bet you that there's a lot of kids that don't give it a shot, because they didn't know about it soon enough. And they kind of have other predetermined notions about different subjects and things that they want to do. And so talk about how learning through robotics can kind of help bridge the gap of some of these missed experience kids might have. Okay, so because of COVID, now we are doing a lot of things online. So online, when we are teaching with a student, typically that student has taken maybe four other online courses, homeschool, and everything else he's doing it on the computer, plus a lot of YouTube channels, and maybe even playing video games in the same computer. So it so we want to differentiate ourselves from all these things. So we send the child a box where the kid will engage and build something while our instructor is watching him on Zoom, just like you and me. And then he would so the student can actually see and talk to the teacher while they're doing it. And then programming language is taught also using online methods. And then that way, we still have the interaction, it is definitely not as good as a classroom setup, but still from a bedroom or wherever the child is, he's able to engage and talk and build. So rather than just listening to a teacher. That's really interesting. And, you know, one of the things that I know you're interested in is, you know, thinking about, you know, future technology, which is, you know, evolving every second, you knew new things are coming out. And I know you're passionate about, you know, talking and teaching kids about that in an early age. Why do you why do you feel that that's so important? Very good question, Anthony. When I first, when I was in college, we I was looking for really good jobs, and went through a list of available jobs at the time. 10 years later, those jobs were no longer the top jobs. In fact, they're not even in the top five. Today, if you look at the highest paying jobs in the job market, particularly when we have this pandemic and downturn economy going on, you go back 10 years, these jobs did not even exist. They've changed so much that the top, top five pay high paying jobs were created in the last 10 years. This is really a different world that we live in. So when we teach our children, are we going to teach something that's going to come 10 years from now? Or are we going to teach something that existed 50 years? So this is where the difference is. So children will be doing things a lot to do with automation, nanotechnology, biometrics, maybe drones, maybe a lot of other things in 10 years from now, that we can't even see and we can't even understand what they will be. So how do you prepare an elementary kid who is nine years old, when he's 20, what kind of a job market that would be and how do you prepare for a market like that? The best way to do it is get the kids interested in what is coming in future technology. So this is the reason we are thinking of and we are constantly engaging our children in future technology related programs, automation, coding related to future, not just something that is obsolete or outdated. But the challenge is we have all these at an industrial level. They don't they're not even existing in university level. So bringing it to high school, middle school and elementary is a big challenge. But we have to do that. That's the only way the kids will know that they will learn something that they'll actually use. Yeah, and I think the learning through robotics is a great way to approach it as a beginning way to approach it because again, things that are dynamic that they bring to life to me is exciting for them, right? And when they see that they remember that they go home and they tell their parents about it. And then they start to get on the path of thinking about how can I do more things like that, you know, as they grow and as they they mature. And so I definitely commend you for doing that. Another thing I want to ask you about though is, you know, women in engineering, women are certainly a minority in engineering. It's a big, big topic today, you know, the diversity in engineering, my wife's an engineer. And I know that she struggled because she's always, you know, the one of the few women in class or you know, whatever the case may be. So how can we start to get young girls interested along the lines of what you're doing in engineering? Very good question. It's a lot to do with stereotyping and stigma attached to it. There's nothing else. Girls, I've been teaching girls for the last 10 years, and they perform equally or better than boys. There is no study anywhere that says that they cannot get into engineering, STEM, science, technology programs. However, if you walk into one of those programs, 95% of the population is usually boys. So getting them interested is the key and the schools and the school districts have to play a major role in this. We offer STEM robotics for girls classes. This is one of the first initiatives in Utah, in multiple universities, particularly at the University of Utah, where we have courses for young girls, after school programs, summer camps, weekend classes, where they would come and learn with the group of girls and a lady teacher. And the whole idea is to promote them, promote these programs among them. And they are parents or champions. They would support us with this initiative. So it's been going on for some time now, but it's a very small step. At school level, we have to do that. We have to have a broader mechanism to promote this. But I really believe it's very important, it's half the population. Yeah, I agree 100%. And that being said, Jay, it's a monumental task. As you just mentioned, how do you stay motivated and inspired to go after this goal when it's such a big task? Very good question. I, when we first advertised this, we expected at least 100 students out of 1000 that we get during the summer. And we got maybe 30. And when we get the 30, it's really discouraging. And even that 30, some of them were just signing up. They were just coming to find out about it. So we got hold of the parents instead of the students and asked them, why did you sign up? What do you want from this? And they all wanted their girls to succeed, become great people, engineers, scientists and all that. So we went around telling people, we actually asked those people to help us promote this. And they were our champions. But it's a very small step. It's really discouraging when a lot of people say I tried my best, but I only have boys in our classes, you know, one girl, maybe, feel lucky. And that's really true. And if you look at the job market, it is the same. We have what 5% of the engineers in Utah, probably girls, I don't know. It's very low. And same with the any of the engineering, mathematics, technology classes, in any of the major universities that we go to, it's a very common trend. But we really have to keep at it and be positive. I really believe because I already I come from Singapore. If you go to an Asian country, if you go to an Asian class, third grade, and ask the students, how many of you like math? It will be 50% or so among girls and among boys. Now I go to the same kind of a class set up here in US and ask the same question, will 50% of the girls will raise their hands and say, I like math, I like stuff. No, this is the difference. Why? Because somehow we have taught our children this way, that these are hard subjects. These are subjects that some should do and the other should not do. So these are stereotypes that we have created. And then the results show the same thing. We get 10% of them actually going to engineering programs as a result, and maybe a lot less, you know, excelling those subjects and take them as careers. But if you come to some of the countries I mentioned, like the Singapore, Japan, China, they have high girl or the female representation in those fields. Yeah, it's interesting because, you know, what fundamentally what you're doing by, you know, giving the kids this experience, I think is amazing. And I think it's life changing for them. However, in order to do that, the challenges that I'm hearing is that you've got to convince the parents and the schools to allow you to do that. And in a lot of cases, some of the stereotypes around that are that, you know, these are hard subjects, my kid, I don't want to push this on them, etc. But you're really, you're really making it fun, you're making it exciting, what you're doing. So that being said, you know, entrepreneurs, you know, being an entrepreneur myself, you know, we like to see things grow. And we like to grow companies and grow initiatives. And I know you want to grow learning through robotics. How do you do that with some of these challenges? How do you how are you planning to try to navigate and overcome some of these challenges? Okay, last December, pre COVID, we just went to classrooms and taught and promote that. So it's pretty much in class robotics, STEM classes. With COVID, we quickly shifted to online. So but the advantage in this is I can teach probably your children, or someone far away from Utah, doing online, I can send a package, and they will open up and then teach them how to download software. And here we are teaching robotics from their homes. So we have that opportunity, which we did not have before, because we were only focused on classes face to face. So this is what we are looking at right now. Our next step is to right now, we don't have any classes taught outside of the state of Utah. So this is where we are planning to move forward. That's our new plan. That's great. And I tell you what, the good thing about how this COVID pandemic may be able to help you go and forward is people are getting more comfortable learning remotely. And now they're very open to remote opportunities. I mean, I know my kids, they were taking Taekwondo before the pandemic, and then they started doing it virtually and everybody adjusted to it, which is you never would have thought of that before that they're doing Taekwondo virtually, you know, so I think the positive and the opportunity here is that for someone like you that has something that's really great, now getting it out to people almost might be easier because there might be more receptive to doing it online. So that that's very exciting. And so with all that being said, Jay, you know, I know how it is to kind of leave one career and start up another one. I did it myself when I went from engineering to doing the coaching and the training and it can be very scary, quite frankly. And you've obviously put a lot of effort into doing this. And you've taught a lot of kids now. You've been in, you know, I think it's thousands of kids, if I'm not mistaken, over 30,000 kids. In fact, talk about how that feels to you being able to accomplish that. Well, when the children grow up, and then when we see them say I saw a kid that was 12 years old, I took him to a competition one time, a robotics competition and we won and I was his coach, training him to win a robotics competition. I met him nine years later. And I just asked him what he's doing and how he's changed. And oh, my goodness, that is the satisfaction to just hear his story. What made him change? I don't know whether he's saying that because I met him, I hope not. But he was certainly interested in pursuing a career related to STEM. Not that I want everybody to do something in STEM, but this is where the job market is. If you look at the job market, these jobs are always available. And they can quickly get into that job market versus a job market that really hard to get into. Or they can have two things that they can learn something that they like, they also can be good at STEM subjects, so that they have an immediate job if they need it. So this is a huge motivation for me. And when I see it is all about I really believe children are the future. Whatever we do to them, however we take care of them is what the world is going to look like in the next 10, 15 years. And I also believe education is not just filling a cup. It is lighting a fire. And if you don't do that as an educator, then no matter how good you are in the subject, you'll end up as a boring teacher. You really have to light the fire on something that you are passionate about. So the student picks it up. And then the next step you know is they will invent. Educate engineers can do all kinds of miraculous things. We do a thing called product design, where we teach students how to design a product. And when they do that, they look around and they realize every product that they have in their room, it has been designed by somebody. They never thought about it before. You know, so these are little things to get them inspired and excited. I always like the logo that we we call it inspired the next generation, because it is the next generation that we really have to focus on education. Yeah, that's really powerful stuff. They're Jay, it's good to hear you talk about teaching like that. I mean, someone myself who does, you know, a lot of corporate training. I also, as I said, I have young kids that I'm constantly trying to teach things. I also coach some of their sports teams. And this is all teaching and engaging with people. And you know, the ability to engage with someone is so important, especially the youth as you're suggesting. And in fact, my mom is a math teacher, and I visited her class one time to do an engineering kind of demo and for civil engineering. And what it decided to do is instead of talking about civil engineering was to have them each draw out a plan with a building in the site. And I gave them cutouts of a building of trees of a parking lot. And these kids were thrilled. I mean, they were so excited. We put a time limit on it. They were working on their projects and moving things around. And so, you know, I think that this is a really important message for people to take away in terms of teaching, just in general, right, teaching STEM, teaching, you know, whatever, whatever you're trying to teach people anything is it being engaging and giving them something interesting to learn and an interesting way to apply it. So what we're going to do right now is we're going to take a quick break and then we're going to come back with Jane, we're going to wrap this one up with one thought in our Take Action Today segment. All right, we're back with Jay, Jay Asilin from Learning Through Robotics. We're talking about some really interesting stuff and engaging the youth and teaching STEM and getting them excited and what Jay's doing is really interesting to me because what you're doing, Jay, is you're taking something that's an interesting concept, but you're bringing a lot of things into the mix. You're bringing the building component, you're bringing the coding component, you're bringing the dynamic animation component into it, which is what we have to do to teach people and get kids excited about something. And so to that point, Jay, what we'd like to do in this end segment, we have a lot of listeners that are STEM professionals. And a lot of them are always interested in getting out there to the youth and teaching them about STEM. What are some things that they can do? They're working every day, but they want to make a difference. So what do you recommend that they can do to start driving STEM and making some changes? Thank you. First, to make a change, they should start at home. With their children, if they have children or their brothers and sisters, or I'm pretty sure at least one of their neighbors will have some children. And they should find a way to approach them through the parents and see whether they will be interested in learning about technology. And if these viewers or your listeners, if they have any knowledge about coding, about robotics, about technology, I think this would be a very good start. And then what they know, if they can teach, that will always stay. I believe that. If they don't teach, it'll just go with them. I'm pretty sure you heard this before, but if we never give what we have, we'll just take it to the grave. And nobody will ever be able to see how we taught, how we designed, because some of these great scientists, when they die, when we find their diaries, we see a lot of sketches that we have no idea what they were thinking, because they didn't tell those last few hours of thinking, and they could have been great thing, maybe medicine for cancer. I don't know. Great ideas, they probably had, but they're gone. So I think they should start teaching, like you properly said before, to anyone that they can think of, not necessarily STEM, anything that they know. This is the first step. Second, they have to get involved with the school district. They have to get involved with the school. That's where students are there. And they are teachers, they are principals that they can approach. If their kid is going to a school, I'm pretty sure the principal will listen to them. If they have a skill that they can teach, it doesn't have, it can be cooking. It can be practical. I'm a very big believer of practical application. Things that they can actually do tomorrow, like cooking, like coding, like making a website, something they can do immediately, rather than you have to learn a lot to do. So STEM subjects are very practical. And it will also help them in their regular subjects. So these are two things I would really like the listeners to do, either to do something at home with your own people, or with the school district. Those are two places where you can immediately reach future generations. That's great. I mean, essentially, if you want to teach, you got to start teaching wherever you can. It doesn't have to, you don't have to go right into schools right away, like Jay's doing, you can start at home. You can start by sitting down with your kids and teaching them something in an exciting and an engaging way. And just continue to improve from there. So Jay, before we let you go, what's next for learning through robotics? Well, we certainly want to take this program to multiple states. So we are already talking to a few universities, we always partner with the universities. In Utah, we have partnered with universities where the university engineering students are our teachers. So they get a part time income. At the same time, they learn how to teach young children. So we want to do the same kind of a model with multiple universities across the nation. That's awesome. And your website is roboticsstem.com. Is that right? Yes. So roboticsstem.com, you can learn all about learning through robotics. And really, what you have to think about is if you want to spread and help to spread STEM through future generations, we need to teach in a way that engages people and teach in a way that excites the youth about engineering. Engineering can certainly be can sound interesting, but when they see it in motion to me is when real powerful things happen. So Jay, thank you so much for taking some time to come on the podcast and talk with us. I really wish you all the best in what you're doing because I think it's important. And it seems like you have a really good plan of how you're going to inspire people in STEM. So thank you so much. Thank you for having me. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please leave your comments and or questions in the comment section below this video. Also, if you'd like to view the full show notes for this episode, visit engineeringmanagementinstitute.org or see the link in the video description. There you will find the key points discussed in today's episode as well as links to any of the resources, websites or books mentioned during the episode. Until next time, I wish you the best in all your engineering career endeavors.