[Music]
[Applause]
in 1992 NASA’s longest-tenured
administrator Daniel Goldin was rumored
to have declared that the culture of
space science was becoming a little bit
too Pale Male and stale and at the time
that he made this declaration my
grandfather would have been a member of
the space science community for about 15
years in 1958 he and my grandmother were
two of the first African American
students to integrate the University of
Texas at Austin he studied engineering
and she studied microbiology light
weights there existed no template for
what they set out to accomplish
there were no black scientists for them
to look up to there were no black
faculty to help them at the best of
times they had to prove their competence
to professors and students who viewed
them as fundamentally inferior and not
the worst of times they had to think
about their safety because there were
factions that didn’t want to see them at
UT because they didn’t want to see them
alive humiliation was the name of the
game my grandfather applied to be a TA
for a physics class his senior year and
was informed by the professor that one
of his jobs as a teacher’s assistant in
addition to grading papers and holding
office hours was to clean his office and
this wasn’t something that I knew the
other TAS were required to do and my
grandmother once confided in me that she
went through everyday wondering if today
would be the day that the Negro students
dorm was gonna get fire bombed as
promised UT at Austin’s current
President Gregory sunbeds summed it up
pretty well in an address to the first
black class in 2016 there were faculty
and staff that provided the education to
which you were entitled but you
encountered hatred and he faced
segregated residence halls and dining
halls you remained undaunted demanding
your basic human rights you were
breaking down barriers a tenured faculty
member in the Cockrell School of
Engineering told my grandfather that it
was unlikely that he would ever be hired
as an engineer and he went on to
graduate a few years later the first
black man from their School of
Engineering with the second highest job
offer in his class
my grandparents decided to get married
on their graduation day because they’re
scientists is a very practical and so
their reasoning was that it was free and
everyone was already there with fresh
haircuts so why waste the day they got
married they graduated they got in their
car and headed west and they agreed
never to come back to that school again
but I don’t think they knew how many
barriers were ahead of them my
grandfather would go on to be one of
America’s first black aerospace
engineers rocket scientists unlike any
of you had seen before and we know from
films like hidden figures that the Space
Science community in the 60s was still
segregated still very much based on a
social hierarchy of racial inferiority
that remains unproven today and my
grandfather and I never got a chance to
talk about what it was like for him to
be a black rocket scientist aside from
being motional II detached facts
it was difficult he put a lot of work in
he had to represent an entire group of
people every step he took and he really
hoped that all the hard work he and my
grandmother put in wouldn’t manifest in
me pursuing a degree in the humanities
and I didn’t if there’s one thing though
that he did instill in me
it’s the secret that people think that
scientists are somehow smarter than
average that you have to be more
brilliant and actually scientists are
just people who are willing to put in
more time and effort and hard work and
that hard work pays off when you get to
be the hero who finds a cure to cancer
or launches a rocket if you hated math
or science in high school you’re not
alone as a matter of fact one in three
Americans would actually rather clean a
bathroom than solve an equation at any
given time according to the stem attica
see think tank changed the equation an
American students ranked 26th out of 34
developed nations internationally on
math and science test scores only 26% of
high school seniors are considered
proficient in math now if you’re like me
and you think that standardized test
doors don’t tell the entire story of
someone’s aptitude you might be
concerned by the fact that fewer than 30
that fewer than 30% of all American
scientists are women and
fewer than 10% of all American
scientists are african-american Native
American or Latina my grandfather
noticed that the majority of his
co-workers were brought in from outside
countries on work visas and today this
still remains the same phenomenon 70
point three percent of all electrical
engineering graduate students were
brought in from outside countries the
most troubling thing about the fact that
we hold this widespread phobia of math
and science in the United States was a
finding by Stanford graduate school last
year that found 84 percent of American
middle schoolers to college students
unable to distinguish real facts from
fake news and the problem that I see
here is not in the inherent difficulty
of math and science or inherent
difficulty in teaching it it’s a
widespread phobia of math and science
and it repr Pecha AIT’s itself
culturally when parents say things to
their kids like I was never really that
good at math and you don’t really have
to be either so three years ago I
started an educational nonprofit with a
program called Sparkle and that stands
for science projects art and robotics
for kids to learn everywhere and I asked
other college scientists to write
lessons with me on all of the things
that we could have learned sooner and we
did a lot of research about all of the
curricula in the countries that outrank
us in math and science scores which is
most of them and what they did and how
soon it takes our reasoning was that if
it takes 10,000 hours to master a
subject you can’t start those hours in
high school you’re already behind and so
we took a centered and small-batch
approach to it these college level
students college students teaching
college curriculum paired with
elementary teachers the students
understand the content and the teachers
understand through kids we create a
culture of belonging with rituals like
our white coat ceremony in which every
child gets a kid sized white lab coat so
that they know that we take them
seriously as future researchers we still
have free time to it we don’t just make
them do math all day the goal at the
sparkle program is to make sure that all
of our future problem solvers understand
that they can be the future too all they
have to do is put in the time and effort
that it takes to be brilliant
and their parents know what we already
know that any child can be good at math
and science when you put the time and
effort into it I’ve worked out a lot of
science camps that focus on child
development over child education and the
problem that I have with that is that it
puts too much of an emphasis on
entertainment and not even that much of
an emphasis on practice and if a student
can see that you’re causing an explosion
or making fire change colors and they
can explain to you what’s happening but
not why there’s very little difference
between your science demo and a magic
trick our goal at the Sparkle program
isn’t just to incite a spark with the
kids and make sure that they’re excited
about math and science because it’s
already very exciting it’s about giving
them the hours of practice that it takes
to have the skill set to not drop out by
the time they actually get to the harder
work now when I started the program my
mentors and education were very
supportive of it but highly dubious that
I could achieve its goals because it
wouldn’t be developmentally appropriate
to do the work that we do for example it
wouldn’t be developmentally appropriate
for an eight year old to balance
combustion equations and now I can show
them things like this I didn’t learn how
to balance combustion equations until it
was too late in high school but it turns
out that when you teach things step by
step the students are able to do just
fine with it
we do take a hands-on approach because
we want the children to be engaged and
we we take a student-led approach for
the same reason we never take more than
twenty students at a time our goal is to
reach and teach as many children as
possible by translating our ethos to as
many other people as possible and that
starts with understanding that math and
science are not impossible to teach they
just need a new approach
there are two reasons why we think it’s
important to support innovative
approaches to science education the
first is that our science education
can’t get any worse than it already is
our students are among the lowest
ranking in the world our nation produces
among this the lowest amount of
scientists in the world the people that
are going to cure diseases solve crises
and the people that have to know how to
solve other problems through applying
scientific method are not growing up in
this country the other reason why is
because we know from the history of
science and innovation that our greatest
discoveries often come from underdogs
Albert Einstein wrote in his theory of
relativity while he was a clerk in the
Swiss Patent Office and we know that my
grandparents didn’t have any role models
in stem anyone to look like what they
were trying to accomplish and there
exists no template for the times in
which we are living right now that the
President of the United States is a
reality television star the time would
be now to change our mindset and to take
a new approach because we really don’t
have much to lose thank you
[Applause]
[Applause]
in 1992 NASA’s longest-tenured
administrator Daniel Goldin was rumored
to have declared that the culture of
space science was becoming a little bit
too Pale Male and stale and at the time
that he made this declaration my
grandfather would have been a member of
the space science community for about 15
years in 1958 he and my grandmother were
two of the first African American
students to integrate the University of
Texas at Austin he studied engineering
and she studied microbiology light
weights there existed no template for
what they set out to accomplish
there were no black scientists for them
to look up to there were no black
faculty to help them at the best of
times they had to prove their competence
to professors and students who viewed
them as fundamentally inferior and not
the worst of times they had to think
about their safety because there were
factions that didn’t want to see them at
UT because they didn’t want to see them
alive humiliation was the name of the
game my grandfather applied to be a TA
for a physics class his senior year and
was informed by the professor that one
of his jobs as a teacher’s assistant in
addition to grading papers and holding
office hours was to clean his office and
this wasn’t something that I knew the
other TAS were required to do and my
grandmother once confided in me that she
went through everyday wondering if today
would be the day that the Negro students
dorm was gonna get fire bombed as
promised UT at Austin’s current
President Gregory sunbeds summed it up
pretty well in an address to the first
black class in 2016 there were faculty
and staff that provided the education to
which you were entitled but you
encountered hatred and he faced
segregated residence halls and dining
halls you remained undaunted demanding
your basic human rights you were
breaking down barriers a tenured faculty
member in the Cockrell School of
Engineering told my grandfather that it
was unlikely that he would ever be hired
as an engineer and he went on to
graduate a few years later the first
black man from their School of
Engineering with the second highest job
offer in his class
my grandparents decided to get married
on their graduation day because they’re
scientists is a very practical and so
their reasoning was that it was free and
everyone was already there with fresh
haircuts so why waste the day they got
married they graduated they got in their
car and headed west and they agreed
never to come back to that school again
but I don’t think they knew how many
barriers were ahead of them my
grandfather would go on to be one of
America’s first black aerospace
engineers rocket scientists unlike any
of you had seen before and we know from
films like hidden figures that the Space
Science community in the 60s was still
segregated still very much based on a
social hierarchy of racial inferiority
that remains unproven today and my
grandfather and I never got a chance to
talk about what it was like for him to
be a black rocket scientist aside from
being motional II detached facts
it was difficult he put a lot of work in
he had to represent an entire group of
people every step he took and he really
hoped that all the hard work he and my
grandmother put in wouldn’t manifest in
me pursuing a degree in the humanities
and I didn’t if there’s one thing though
that he did instill in me
it’s the secret that people think that
scientists are somehow smarter than
average that you have to be more
brilliant and actually scientists are
just people who are willing to put in
more time and effort and hard work and
that hard work pays off when you get to
be the hero who finds a cure to cancer
or launches a rocket if you hated math
or science in high school you’re not
alone as a matter of fact one in three
Americans would actually rather clean a
bathroom than solve an equation at any
given time according to the stem attica
see think tank changed the equation an
American students ranked 26th out of 34
developed nations internationally on
math and science test scores only 26% of
high school seniors are considered
proficient in math now if you’re like me
and you think that standardized test
doors don’t tell the entire story of
someone’s aptitude you might be
concerned by the fact that fewer than 30
that fewer than 30% of all American
scientists are women and
fewer than 10% of all American
scientists are african-american Native
American or Latina my grandfather
noticed that the majority of his
co-workers were brought in from outside
countries on work visas and today this
still remains the same phenomenon 70
point three percent of all electrical
engineering graduate students were
brought in from outside countries the
most troubling thing about the fact that
we hold this widespread phobia of math
and science in the United States was a
finding by Stanford graduate school last
year that found 84 percent of American
middle schoolers to college students
unable to distinguish real facts from
fake news and the problem that I see
here is not in the inherent difficulty
of math and science or inherent
difficulty in teaching it it’s a
widespread phobia of math and science
and it repr Pecha AIT’s itself
culturally when parents say things to
their kids like I was never really that
good at math and you don’t really have
to be either so three years ago I
started an educational nonprofit with a
program called Sparkle and that stands
for science projects art and robotics
for kids to learn everywhere and I asked
other college scientists to write
lessons with me on all of the things
that we could have learned sooner and we
did a lot of research about all of the
curricula in the countries that outrank
us in math and science scores which is
most of them and what they did and how
soon it takes our reasoning was that if
it takes 10,000 hours to master a
subject you can’t start those hours in
high school you’re already behind and so
we took a centered and small-batch
approach to it these college level
students college students teaching
college curriculum paired with
elementary teachers the students
understand the content and the teachers
understand through kids we create a
culture of belonging with rituals like
our white coat ceremony in which every
child gets a kid sized white lab coat so
that they know that we take them
seriously as future researchers we still
have free time to it we don’t just make
them do math all day the goal at the
sparkle program is to make sure that all
of our future problem solvers understand
that they can be the future too all they
have to do is put in the time and effort
that it takes to be brilliant
and their parents know what we already
know that any child can be good at math
and science when you put the time and
effort into it I’ve worked out a lot of
science camps that focus on child
development over child education and the
problem that I have with that is that it
puts too much of an emphasis on
entertainment and not even that much of
an emphasis on practice and if a student
can see that you’re causing an explosion
or making fire change colors and they
can explain to you what’s happening but
not why there’s very little difference
between your science demo and a magic
trick our goal at the Sparkle program
isn’t just to incite a spark with the
kids and make sure that they’re excited
about math and science because it’s
already very exciting it’s about giving
them the hours of practice that it takes
to have the skill set to not drop out by
the time they actually get to the harder
work now when I started the program my
mentors and education were very
supportive of it but highly dubious that
I could achieve its goals because it
wouldn’t be developmentally appropriate
to do the work that we do for example it
wouldn’t be developmentally appropriate
for an eight year old to balance
combustion equations and now I can show
them things like this I didn’t learn how
to balance combustion equations until it
was too late in high school but it turns
out that when you teach things step by
step the students are able to do just
fine with it
we do take a hands-on approach because
we want the children to be engaged and
we we take a student-led approach for
the same reason we never take more than
twenty students at a time our goal is to
reach and teach as many children as
possible by translating our ethos to as
many other people as possible and that
starts with understanding that math and
science are not impossible to teach they
just need a new approach
there are two reasons why we think it’s
important to support innovative
approaches to science education the
first is that our science education
can’t get any worse than it already is
our students are among the lowest
ranking in the world our nation produces
among this the lowest amount of
scientists in the world the people that
are going to cure diseases solve crises
and the people that have to know how to
solve other problems through applying
scientific method are not growing up in
this country the other reason why is
because we know from the history of
science and innovation that our greatest
discoveries often come from underdogs
Albert Einstein wrote in his theory of
relativity while he was a clerk in the
Swiss Patent Office and we know that my
grandparents didn’t have any role models
in stem anyone to look like what they
were trying to accomplish and there
exists no template for the times in
which we are living right now that the
President of the United States is a
reality television star the time would
be now to change our mindset and to take
a new approach because we really don’t
have much to lose thank you
[Applause]
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