Matt Scott and Andrew O’Brien are passionate about implementing the STEM curriculum into schools, working as Secondary STEM Coordinator and STEM Curriculum Advisor respectively for the New South Wales Department of Education, Australia.

Both have a passion for all things aerospace, and we recently spoke with them about ProtoSat, a STEM teaching program developed by the NSW (New South Wales) Department of Education's Secondary Curriculum team, in collaboration with UNSW (University of New South Wales), Canberra Space, and Thunderstruck Space.

Arduino Education: Hi both, thank you for taking the time to speak with us today! Let’s get straight into it - can you tell us a little bit about your roles right now?

Matt Scott: We both work in the corporate sector, or the corporate part of the New South Wales Department of Education. We support schools to implement syllabuses and curriculum. When a new syllabus is released, it's our job to produce sample resources that might go with that.

It might be a unit of work or some student or teacher resources. Andrew and I work closely together on producing sample units of work or teacher resources or student resources that support integrated STEM. They’re exciting units of work that have a little bit of science, a little bit of technology, and a little bit of mathematics all wrapped up into one, usually with a strong link to things happening in the real world.

AE: Amazing, it sounds like a really interesting program! What exactly keeps you inspired during this?

MS: Well, what inspires me is anything that makes me feel like a little kid again! Anything that creates that excitement, that enthusiasm for learning.

AE: That must be what makes you so great in education! And Andrew, in a similar sense, are there any influences like people or books that have had an effect on you?

Andrew O’Brien: I'm just someone that's always diving in and learning, using things like online libraries. If I had to give a list, it would be technical libraries, the various YouTube channels that I subscribe to, pretty much anything to do with Raspberry Pis, Arduinos, microcontrollers, sensors, data connections, and IoT! I'm just constantly trying to get a handle on things and understand to be better, I have a huge love of learning.

AE: Again, that makes you perfect for working alongside education! So Matt, what’s one thing you wish you’d have known at the beginning of your career?

MS: I wish I knew how rewarding a teaching career would be. Before I went to uni, I didn't find that out until I actually got into classrooms and started to work with young people. The joy that you take from seeing someone who has a problem, and then they find a solution for it; you get to see that light bulb moment. I wish I knew about that before I made some serious life choices, because I would have got into teaching much earlier.

AE: So let’s get stuck into today’s topic. As an intro, can you briefly explain what STEM is for those reading this who might not know?

MS: STEM is an acronym which stands for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. As for the origins of teaching STEM, we tend to trace it back to the space race in the sixties, when JFK got up in the US and talked about a space race and reaching the moon in less than 10 years.

For that to happen, it would have been a huge scientific and engineering endeavor. And so the common opinion is that that's when this idea of teaching STEM and targeting science and engineering with the support of mathematics in order to accelerate achievements came about.

AE: That’s a great explanation! For you guys in the education sector, what are the challenges of creating this integrated approach?

MS: One of the challenges can be that, certainly in our education system, schools are set up in silos. So we have the people that teach science, people that teach mathematics, people that teach technologies and engineering. But for a true integrated STEM project, you have to create this perfect environment where everyone sees the purpose and values it and works collaboratively to achieve a shared outcome. It's very hard to teach integrated STEM or STEAM when you're the only believer in your school; where you see the value of it but you can't get your colleagues on board.

AO’B: Another big challenge is that we don't actually have syllabus documents for STEM. As such, we rely on the various core subjects such as the science, technology, math, and engineering syllabuses. There's no one succinct document that we can just grab as the STEM subject. Having said that, that is also an opportunity for us, too!

AE: They are both really good insights. So to finish, can you tell us a little bit about the ProtoSat project that you’ve been working on?

MS: Previously, satellites were very large, expensive things that only governments could afford to put out there. But with micronization, technology is becoming smaller. All of a sudden, we can make a functional satellite a lot smaller. We're looking at doing in a classroom, what other organizations here in Australia and indeed around the world are doing.

We're getting students to make a weather cube set that will measure and gather data about the weather around it. We're doing that by following an engineering design process, which is modeled on what happens in the real world, specifically what happens at University of New South Wales, Canberra. Essentially, we want students to take a microcontroller with some sensors, design some code to sample some weather and store it somewhere, then we want them to design and build a CubeSat rack that will hold that equipment and that will withstand the challenges of going into space. The thermal challenges, the vibration challenges, the shock challenges.

We want students to design some experiments to prove that their projects are flight-ready. As part of this, we also want them to gather local data so that we can look at that data, organize it, and then we can tell the story that the data is telling us. That's a little bit of a nutshell of what the CubeSat program is.

AO’B: That’s basically it! We hope students will get a very good understanding of the process and the thinking for what they need to do in a real-world scenario. And I suppose it's developing the skills of thinking to solve problems, which are very much in line with what space science has to deal with.

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