Severe Nor’easters cause an environmental catastrophe in Greater Philadelphia , leaving only 50,000 survivors, many with injuries, flooding roadways and cutting off power and water supplies. How do you go about immediately evacuating 3,000 people? That’s a real world problem, and it’s what the Delaware Valley Industrial Resource Center, among others, believe can stimulate an interest and passion for Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) skills.
The DVIRC, an economic development organization that serves small- to mid-sized manufacturing enterprises throughout Greater Philadelphia, has partnered with the U.S. Navy and regional educational service agency Chester County Intermediate Unit to introduce the Real World Navy Challenge. The program, funded by the Lenfest Foundation, will begin Oct. 1 with hundreds of middle and high school students from six Chester County school districts forming teams to solve the evacuation problem through web-based applications.
“The good things that have happened in our sphere of activity has been done through focused collaboration and distributed leadership,” says DVIRC executive vice president Tony Girifalco. “We’ve made a significant commitment to supporting STEM and applied engineering education because it produces the kind of people our clients need and fabulous career opportunities.”
The program incorporates existing curriculum and academic standards through unifying themes of database inquiry and design, the use of modeling, scaled measurement and patterns of change. Algebra and geometry figure prominently in the problem-solving, which answers the age old student question: How am I going to use this stuff in the real world?
Girifalco says the program will culminate with a program in the spring that shows off the solutions, and the hope is to replicate the program in other areas in years to come.
Source: Tony Girifalco, Delaware Valley Industrial Resource Center
Writer: Joe Petrucci