Regaining Focus: A Point of View and a Presentation

We had a presentation about our point of view on May 4, 2011 (well, the official presentations and deadline was May 2, but no one in the class did very well at identifying a real point of view, so it was sort of extended to May 4). Thankfully, on our May 3 meeting, we managed to regain focus.

In class, whenever one of the teaching staff would talk with us about our project, they would mention that we should make sure that we were focused on real user needs and that we should avoid jumping towards solutions. Two of them independently told us that we might not want to focus just on STEM but on STEAM: Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Math (but then our group name would no longer be a play on a steam engine -- it would just be a STEAM Engine!). We told one of the guest lecturers about our project and they nearly cringed: "That's important, but it's been tried a thousand times. Good luck!" We were told that our solution was inside the box. When we talked about our potential solutions, people commented, "it doesn't seem like those hands-on solutions are targeted towards STEM," and, because we were focused on STEM, we quickly moved to defend the ways that our solutions were connected to STEM rather than looking at the user needs that our solutions addressed and seeing the merit of our solutions in spite of and in light of those comments.

We were all certain that there was a need to increase STEM education because of our backgrounds as engineers and our frustration with the inequity in STEM education across the US. My group members weren't phased, but it made me a little nervous. I wasn't sure that we had identified a real user need. One of the first lectures in the class was on taking a step back to make sure that we weren't jumping to conclusions too fast, and I thought that we might need to take a step back.

I brought this up in our meeting the day before our point of view was due. A point of view is a statement of the following form: ____ needs ______ because _______. It should get beneath the surface of what people say that they need and down to emotions and insights. A point of view will identify what people care about. Points of view are the banners under which people will pledge their lives and deaths. Our problem is that we weren't coming up with points of view that people would fight for. We were too shallow. We thought that our insights were points of view. "Children need parental support because they will get engaged in STEM" might be a true statement, but it isn't a guiding vision.

Me: I don't think that any of these are points of view. I don't think that we ever identified a need. We interviewed people who ended up in STEM fields, but it's not like they were happier or better off than the people we interviewed who didn't end up in STEM fields. No one who didn't have STEM said that they had an unmet need for STEM.

Of course there's a need. The US is falling behind the rest of the world in science and technology. It's reducing our innovation and economic competitiveness. Obama just released a report saying that the US needs more focus in STEM.

Then perhaps we should interview Obama. Then, we would have a point of view like "Obama needs the US to increase its focus in STEM because he wants the US to remain economically competitive." However, we don't know Obama, and any change that we would make for that point of view would be a national intervention to satisfy Obama. Our point of view should focus on an individual that has an unmet need for STEM, and I'm not sure that we interviewed anyone who expressed that.

Actually, I interviewed one parent that said that they wanted to expose their kids to STEM topics but didn't know how to.

At that point, our group was back on track. We shaped our point of view around that parent. He didn't have a technical background, but he wanted to help his kids with science and math type topics because he felt it was his duty.

We came up with the following point of view:

Parents from non-engineering backgrounds need to expose their children to engineering topics at a young age because they feel like engineering is part of a fundamental skill set that they need to provide in order to be a responsible parent.

Feeling like a responsible parent is the stuff that points of view are made of. Children of Men situates a parent's responsibility to their children as the center of civilization. The Road situates a parent's responsibility to his child as the center of ethics. Providing for one's children is something that people kill and die for. We finally found something meaningful.

The comments that we got between May 2 and May 3 and our progression towards the straight and narrow: