MANKATO — Robots are coming to a school near you.
However, unlike a Terminator-esque dystopia, many educators view this as a good thing.
On Friday Minnesota State University held the graduation of the “Train the Trainers Program,” a robotics program that helps teach educators and students about various aspects of robotics before supplying them with materials for STEM courses at their schools.
“What we’re doing is we are increasing accessibility to STEM education across Minnesota. We have teachers and partners from schools such as Luverne, Waseca, Fairmont, Tri-City United, really across southern Minnesota represented. We are providing them with the hands-on experience they need to be able to bring advanced education into their schools,” said Travis Thul, vice president for student success and engagement at MSU and administrator of the new program.
“We initially started experimentation last year with three schools: Mankato East, West and Central,” Thul said. With support from partners, they’ve expanded to 12 schools today.
The program — officially called the Rural Experiential STEM Education Partnership Initiative or RESEPI — is a two-week course that runs these participants through the gauntlet, teaching everything from how to code, to how to build the robots and install the code in them, all the way to operation. At the end of the course, a graduation ceremony with a robotics tournament is held, and the schools receive supplies to integrate robotics courses or lessons into their curricula.
“We will be providing each and every one of these schools enough equipment to translate this education into actual practice for their students. So we will be impacting somewhere along the lines of 600 students this fall across 12 schools,” Thul said.
The schools represented in the program this year were Waseca, Madelia, Tri-City United, Nicollet, River Bend, Shakopee, Rosa Parks, and Fairmont along with Mankato East, West and Central.
Dave Stahl is a trades and industry teacher at Mankato East and was one of the teachers who took part in the pilot program last year, and he came back as an instructor for this year’s program. He says the importance of education like this extends beyond just robotics or manufacturing.
“We want every child to be exposed to learning how to code so they can use that part of their brain that they normally would not use and just understand how robotics works, and it also gives them a chance to do something hands-on in their school where they can apply math and physics and technical reading in a unique way,” he said.
One of the teachers taking part in the program this year, Alex Medrano of Nicollet High School, echoed that sentiment.
“We don’t have any robotics team, so this is kind of our first exposure to all of it. It’s kind of nice, even though it’s been a quick two weeks. We’ve learned a lot, so yeah, it’s been interesting,” Medrano said. “A lot of times learning how to view something like this isn’t just correlated to what we’re doing with the robot, but also thinking about how they can work systems like this and really process the information to then problem solve or to adjust or to improve. And so it’s a lot of thinking it’s a lot of going back and reassessing things and a lot of trying new things.”
And sometimes the students even take the initiative themselves to make sure those lessons and resources are accessible to their schools.
“I know one of our old robotics mentors had contact information for Travis and we know that he worked with the RESEPI program, so I emailed him and asked if there was anything we could do to advance this, to help him out, and we got invited to this,” Elias Monroe said.
Monroe is a junior at Fairmont High School, and is a member of their robotics program, The Megahertz. He was in attendance along with other members of that club including Gabriella Thoeni, a junior, and Hannah Gries, a sophomore.
“We are a rural area where there aren’t as many opportunities (as there are) on the coast or in more populated areas, such as the Cities, so it offers job opportunities, not just farming, or it can actually contribute to that in the future by providing more technology” Thoeni said. “You have the opportunity to get a better education in technology.”
And opportunities like that help foster all sorts of interests in students, as Thoeni points out.
“For me personally on our robotics team, I do a lot of our art. A lot of the people on our team don’t just do robots,” she said. “Elias here, he works with our business aspects, he’s the one who gets in contact (with people), and it’s just a really important part of robotics that you can see throughout the community.”
Those opportunities translate to the workforce in communities across the region, not just as a way of teaching skills to students they’ll use for the rest of their lives, but also in opening their eyes to new ideas or paths that may have previously seemed too difficult or closed off.
“Exposure to STEM really opens that whole career field, because I was never going to look into a STEM career, but with being on robotics and having access to that, it just really opened my eyes to jobs I didn’t know were jobs,” Gries said.