Planting the seeds

Project Lead the Way preps students for engineering careers

By Sean Ryan

Bradley Tech teacher Eric Losin, who usually teaches calculus, also instructs a high school level course from the Project Lead the Way curriculum. Photos by Sean Ryan

Natasha Posey lost her composure in front of the students.

The math and science teacher and her seventh graders from Milwaukee’s Golda Meir Elementary School were visiting Chris Levas’ freshman class at Milwaukee’s Riverside University High School to discuss engineering assignments for Project Lead the Way.

“The seventh graders have made it,” she beamed, telling Levas that some of her kids were helping out the older students.

Without warning, she pumped her fists in the air and brought them down victoriously as she danced in a circle.

The kids seemed to be having fun too. The freshmen were teaching the seventh graders programmable logic control, which, for you adults, involves a computer controlling electrical circuits to work a machine.

Teams of students leaned over black plastic bases, plugging twists of wire into tiny moving parts. Each team had laptops to control its devices. One group perfected programmable logic control before the bell rang, so Levas gave the students new marching orders.

“Show off; show what you can do and let them do it,” he said.

So the freshmen pulled out a gizmo they made that, once complete, will sort marbles according to color.

Riverside University High School teacher Chris Levas instructs Project Lead the Way courses along with engineering, physical science and biology, which he teaches in both English and Spanish.

The Project Lead the Way students are reinforcements for the country’s engineering companies. Project Lead the Way is a national group established in 1997 that offers a curriculum encouraging middle and high school students to care about math and science. There are 205 schools in Wisconsin that offer the courses.

The curriculum’s hands-on approach grounds every math problem in reality. It’s the antidote for students who don’t care about two imaginary trains on the same track heading toward each other at different speeds.

If students aren’t interested in math, teachers find something the students care about and use it to teach them, said Eric Losin, who teaches Project Lead the Way courses at the Lynde and Harry Bradley School of Technology and Trade in Milwaukee.

“These students have a certain set of interests that you have to tailor to,” he said.

One of his student’s assignments was to design rims for cars using the Autodesk Inventor Professional program, which is the basis of much of the curriculum. Losin said his class particularly likes Inventor’s chrome option, which coats the digital machine parts with a reflective sheen.

“Of course, everything they did in the first couple of weeks was chrome,” he said. “They did a cabinet; it’s chrome. They did dice; they’re chrome.”

Esteban Ornelas’ rims — chrome, of course — feature a capital E punching out of the center of the hubcap.

“At first, I thought it was going to be boring, but once I learned how to do the program, it was fun,” Ornelas said. “It took us at least a month to learn the program.

Then we did some car design, rims, all sorts of stuff.”

Ornelas said he doesn’t know what he wants to do with his future, but he said he’d consider a job in engineering.

“Sure,” he said. “Why not? It’s fun.”

Milwaukee Area Technical College engineering and math Professor Susan Lunsford (leaning) helps Riverside University High School students with their programmable logic control project. Dana Finne (left), a student teacher from Milwaukee’s Cardinal Stritch University, watches.

Project Lead the Way targets minority and female students who are largely missing from the current crop of engineers, said John Farrow, Wisconsin Project Lead the Way’s affiliate director and a professor of mechanical engineering at the Milwaukee School of Engineering.

Losin’s Bradley Tech class has seven boys and five girls. Girls outnumbered the boys when the classes from Golda Meir and Riverside met. White males were scarce in both groups. Levas said he hopes to start teaching his Project Lead the Way courses in both English and Spanish next year.

“We have to approach a broader population, and that’s one thing Project Lead the Way does for females and minorities,” Farrow said. “[Women] are never encouraged to do this because our culture isn’t that way.”

Farrow came out of semi-retirement in 2002 to work with MSOE to bring Project Lead the Way to Wisconsin. His job is to put teachers through a two-week summer school where they learn how to teach the special curriculum. The days start at 8 a.m., the teachers — now students — generally stay on the MSOE campus until around 7:30 p.m. and end up doing homework until 9 p.m.

There are about 100 high school students and 1,000 middle school students in Milwaukee Public Schools taking Project Lead the Way courses, said Lauren Baker, MPS coordinator of career and technical education. And, starting next year, every MPS middle school will teach the courses, thanks to a $455,210 grant from Milwaukee-based Rockwell Automation Inc. that will bring the curriculum to the last three schools.

“We will take about five years to roll the program out at MPS; we are in our second year right now,” said Baker. “Kids are totally energized in this stuff. They have fun with it. It keeps them in the seats, so that’s a good predictor of what will happen.”

Project Lead the Way’s middle school curriculum features classes on basic design and modeling, electric currents and circuitry, automation and robots, and aerospace engineering. Its high school syllabus has four mandatory classes — principles of engineering, introduction to engineering design, digital electronics, and engineering design and development — and a series of electives that includes civil engineering and architecture, engineering design and development, computer integrated manufacturing, biotechnical engineering and aerospace engineering.

Susan Lunsford shows how she devised a way to test bridge models by suspending a weight through a hole in the middle of the bridge.

Every class is built around open-ended projects that encourage students to devise their own answers, another motivation for students accustomed to finding answers in the back of the book, said Susan Lunsford, an engineering and math professor at the Milwaukee Area Technical College.

“This program flips that and encourages them to think,” said Lunsford, who writes exams, fixes software glitches and assists both MPS teachers and students for Project Lead the Way. “It’s just amazing to see ninth-graders go to high school who can think.”

The marble-sorting gizmo is a good example. Farrow said each machine has three parts: technology that can recognize a marble’s color, a control mechanism to separate them accordingly and a bin for marbles of each different color.

The project teaches students more than how to make machines sort marbles. They learn how to work as a team and how to take information out of a textbook and use it to solve problems in the real world. They’re going to need those skills in the engineering profession, Farrow said.

And in keeping with the ultimate goal of career prep, Losin required that his Bradley Tech students put their assignments in portfolios to accompany resumes.

“Remember, this is a portfolio, and you are trying to get a job, and you are trying to impress the people who could hire you,” he said to his class.

But he also admitted that the portfolio assignment offers a second level of preparation for a career after school.

“What I try to do is give them more work than they can possibly finish in the time allotted,” he said.