Midnight’s Children

When the Kiefer boys tell it, it sounds like they won the lottery. From oldest (9th grade) to youngest (3rd grade), Lucas, Jack and Quinn surround their kitchen table in Boulder watching playback of their VEX Robotics competition. The two youngest along with their friend Cameron Hoeffler—all of them elementary school students at the time—beat out 71 teams and took first place in Anaheim, California, four months ago.

“Lower it!” Quinn shouts eagerly at the replay of himself competing at VEX. In the video, he and Jack are in the middle of a race, using a remote control to direct a robot they designed and built from a VEX-supplied kit. (Think advanced Erector sets.) “Why aren’t I lowering it?!”

Their “Elephant Bot” creation comprises a crane that lowers a conveyor belt (the “elephant trunk”) to pick up tennis balls, a bifurcated holding like a bowling ball return rack, and flat gray motors on either side (its “ears”). Placed in a 25-yard rink with an opposing robot and miniature speed bump in the middle, the challenge was to get 18 tennis balls in a Plexiglas container under one minute. The photos taken after their triumph show the boys raising their space-agey shovel blade trophies up high next to their winner’s banners. Jason Morrella, president of the Robotics Education & Competition Foundation, congratulated them, joking, “This is the first time the banner is taller than the participants.”

Restructured curriculums and new platforms, like VEX IQ, are finally meeting the expectations of parents and kids already intrigued with STEM. Jack, for instance, memorized 60 of the Pi digits by heart when he was 8. Their father Jason, CEO of online photography startup Pixoto, plans on getting his kids started on C language (computer coding) through kid-friendly RobotC. It’s a sentiment shared by Stephen Butler, the director of technology at Friends’ School in Boulder, where the Kiefer boys attend.

Butler intends to introduce 3D printing to the school, using intuitive design tools like Google SketchUp to build models. But he wants to make sure teachers have their checks and balances in place before moving forward. “Some places,” he says, “jump on the technology tool bandwagon before knowing how to utilize them.” Fortunately, there are programming tools that address this chasm with familiar games like Frogger to teach computer science (or compsci) to middle and high schools.

Known as AgentSheets, the computational thinking program is prevalent throughout the Boulder Valley School District (BVSD) with Aurora public schools next in sight. Created by a professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, AgentSheets focuses on the logic of code rather than the coding itself. “Its not concerned whether you missed a semicolon or an indent,” says Butler. Already in Louisville’s Monarch High School and Broomfield’s Aspen Creek elementary, these platforms move schools closer to the STEM curriculum face-lifts that attract colleges (scholarships, anyone?) and breed the pragmatic independents employers seek.