Curiosity Solves Everything: How to Give More Kids a STEM Jumpstart
In 2017, I submitted a proposal to the National Science Foundation (NSF) for an AI-driven Learning Design Engine dedicated to youth STEM education.
The NSF Seed Fund program was awarding $1 million grants for original R&D across many commercial technology fronts, including those with special societal impact.
My concept was for a Lesson Design Interface where students and teachers could enter curiosity prompts and the AI engine would deliver customized, interactive, story-based AR/VR lessons.
I was channeling ChatGPT before any of us knew what that was.
As you might have guessed, I didn't get the NSF grant. Mostly because I didn't have a prototype "proof-of-concept" for the technology, nor a Technical Lead on my “staff” -- which were the two reasons I needed the grant in the first place (picture me shaking my head).
But I've never given up on this dream. And this past week I had a meeting with a company called Grantify who specializes in helping startups submit a top quality NSF Seed Fund proposal with a higher probability of success.?
I also started looking for a Technical Lead, or at least an advisor, who could help me put some technical structure under this dream.
The Genesis of Story-Driven STEM
Story-based and personalized lessons for teens are extremely vital now because the US still consistently graduates 75% of high schoolers below proficiency in math. I know because I grew up "allergic to algebra."
Now I make my living with math. But only because I taught myself probability and statistics in my 30s using stories, like the infamous tale of the Renaissance gambler, the Chevalier de Méré, who asked his friend Blaise Pascal for some help with a dice betting conundrum. Pascal wrote to his fellow mathematical genius Pierre de Fermat and the series of letters they exchanged became the foundations for Monte Carlo and Wall Street.
I would likely have never learned probability had I not become captivated by that story and internalized its ability to take me back to another time and place. It propelled me to understand roulette, options pricing and volatility, the “edge/odds” formula of Ed Thorp for blackjack and trading, and the inherent randomness in every corner of life and society.
Most kids won't be so lucky. And time is more critical than ever as accelerated technology innovation will dramatically disrupt the economy and potential careers in the next decade.
I was also extra lucky because my Dad was a pilot and he taught me to fly an airplane when I was 15. Though my pilot skills are a little rusty now, I really want to help less-advantaged kids to get FREE flight training and see if they might love it. I'm starting locally in SE Wisconsin and then will expand nationally. More on that soon.
Overall, my big mission is to inspire 1 million teens to discover their passion for science, technology, engineering, and math. To do that, we need to get them to put down the gaming controller and learn how those GPUs actually work.
Coming up, I'm going to share how you can help me jumpstart the first Youth STEM Lab & Flight Studio in Wisconsin.
The Biggest Powerball Jackpot: Getting Every Kid to Bet on Themselves
Some of my favorite stories to get kids interested in math are about probability, a skill-set that is sorely missing even amongst most adults. For instance, I like to show teens how "crazy" their parents are for playing the Powerball lotto and believing they might win.
Below is a video I made in 2016 which gives you an idea of how crazy I get when talking about probability. Btw, when I teach this to teens, I like to draw out the baseball analogy a bit longer as we picture driving back and forth across the country from Boston to LA, trying to decide which precise state, county, town, and block to stop in and pick up our winning “Powerball baseball."
Did you know they made the Powerball 66% harder to win? Learn why the jackpots are growing toward $1 billion and why it's not true that "somebody has to win!" Watch and see the "game" to rob our poorest citizens unfold...
That video, as you can see, was part of a promotion for my story-driven math book for teens Math Is Alive!
I tried to raise advanced sales for that book in 2016 with an IndieGoGo crowdfund campaign. I had read about a podcaster named John Lee Dumas who raised $500,000 for a simple journal and I was like "Surely I can raise $50k for a math book for teens!" My goal was to give away 100k copies as I started my own revolution in story-driven STEM education.
But that crowdfund was a complete flop because I had no idea how to do the marketing. Then I lost the book on my computer when my hard drive crashed (I said I liked math, not that I was smrt…. now I work exclusively in Google docs).
So I'm used to failure when it comes to my youth STEM visions. But I never give up trying new ideas. Like my 2021 plan for a free aviation ground school for less-advantaged kids in southeast Wisconsin… that I would use as a friendly way to get their parents’ permission for their first flight with the EAA Young Eagles program. And I became more inspired recently by two special brothers from Dayton, Ohio.
The Powerball of 1896
In 2023, I read 3 autobiographies about the infamous Wright brothers. Even though I grew up as a pilot in an aviation family, I had never taken the time to learn much about them. And I was blown away by what I found.
If you read my essay series, you’ll come across the first part titled "The Powerball of 1896." In that piece, I try to explain the coincidence of factors that led the Dayton bicycle shop boys to rekindle their youthful interest in flying machines and the magic of birds.
In part two, Curiosity Solves Everything, I dove deeper into their relentless quest and the unbridled tenacity that drove them. The Powerball analogy is about how lucky we are that the events of 1896 even coincided. It is not about how “lucky” the Wrights were. Because… They. Were. Not.
Part three is a work in progress because it gets more technical about how the brothers moved from gliding, and "wing warping" to mimic birds, to inventing manned, powered, and controlled flight with a three-axis aerodynamic system… with LOTS of failures along the way. For that piece I am relying on an out-of-print book by Harry Combs, an aviation pioneer in his own right, who also didn’t learn about the Wrights until later in life.
While there is always fiery debate about who invented the next key flight innovation we know as ailerons, the Wright brothers' early focus on control as the key to solving "the flying problem" paved the runway as they conducted dozens of novel experiments with aerodynamics, airframes, engines, propellers, wings, and mechanical surfaces… and encountered endless dead ends.
Here was my early reaction to reading of their endless curiosity and tenacity...
The unraveling of the discovery, invention, and exponential explosion of powered flight is literally jaw-dropping when you see what happened. It was against most odds that anyone would succeed, let alone the recluse, bicycle shop boys, Wilbur and Orville Wright. As newspapers of the day poked fun at those who tried to invent flying machines, and claimed it would take a million years or more to get it right, you could say there was a winning “powerball” ticket purchased in Dayton, Ohio in August 1896.
And they didn't even start experimenting until nearly 3 years later in 1899. After watching the film Oppenheimer this year on the edge of my seat, as hundreds of scenes fly by to tell that important history, I realized Christopher Nolan would be the perfect director for a “Wright Brothers” film. Now I just have to find a screenwriter who will help me do it for the potential glory.
STEM Education is More Than “Jobs of the Future”
I first realized about a decade ago that my life's big “why” was all about inspiring as many kids as possible to discover their passion for science. But it wasn't all about the obvious challenge -- being able to find meaningful work in an AI economy that forced them to learn and adapt faster than previous generations.
It was also about how difficult life was becoming to navigate in terms of social media and political firestorms. Given the constant shouting and being told what to believe or who to follow, imagine how hard it is for young people, with smartphones constantly in their hands, when even most adults feel overwhelmed by all the emotional noise and image-laden persuasion.
In the 1950s a long-forgotten book was published called How to Lie with Statistics. Today, the people who don’t even understand probability and statistics are the news personalities and social media influencers teaching everyone what’s important. We are flooded in data and there are ever more experts in how not to use it, so youth are almost defenseless against the onslaught of meaningless graphs, charts, and spurious correlations.
Then in 2017, along came a new group of believers and their recently-legitimized pseudoscience: the UFO promoters. With lots of government programs, top-secret documents, and fuzzy videos to point at, they've built a new industry of make believe and “disclosure” about aliens and warp-drives to distract kids from learning real science.
While I am not a trained scientist, I have devoted a good chunk of my life to learning important concepts, research, and relationships in the fields of evolution, astrophysics, and neuroscience. I am writing a book on what these fields grant you when you spend sufficient time with them -- a stunning, timeless view of the Earth and the universe. It's called Deep Time and the UFO Delusion.
There is so much wonder and discovery contained in any one of those areas of science alone that any adult seriously devoting their life to whether or not the government and "black ops" are hiding alien ships and bodies has completely failed their duty to civilization and its hundreds of founders of scientific truth, from Eratosthenes to Einstein.
Our duty is to first learn the science of Galileo, Newton, Darwin, and the 13 Great Women of Science (my other in-progress book) and then we can have fun talking about alien possibilities.???
Simulation and Neuroscience: From the Microscope to the Telescope
Don’t get me wrong. I’ll be among the first in line to welcome aliens to earth (though I’ll probably pass out first). I’ve dreamed about such magical events since I was a boy watching Star Wars, ET, and Close Encounters. But the probability of intelligent life making its way across the galaxy to find us is, you will learn, just too extremely low when you study the “deep time” sciences of astrophysics and biological evolution.?
And there are also many thousands of scientists who would rejoice as well as me if ET pitched a tent on Earth (or rode a bike down our street) where we could see him and study him. Alas, the ones who are really passionate about this, the astrobiologists, devote their careers to studying exoplanets around very distant star systems, and the possibility of detecting any kind of life many light years away.?
领英推荐
Two huge concepts I want to briefly embed in your mind here while we’re talking about science and pseudoscience are…
As an example of simulation, did you know that the European Space Agency Euclid telescope, designed to study dark matter and dark energy, was trained for 2 years on trillions of iterations using a 4,000-GPU cluster that simulated the 100 GB of data it would receive every day before it was launched last year? Euclid’s goal is no less than mapping the universe.
This year, Jensen was speaking at a conference and he summed up the profound revolution about to occur within “digital biology.” While he is no biologist, in one minute of live, unscripted intelligence he captures the essence of what is coming…
For the first time in human history, biology has the opportunity to be engineering, not just science. When something becomes engineering it becomes less sporadic and exponentially improving. It can compound on the benefits of the previous years and every company's contribution, every researcher's contributions, compound on each other. For the very first time we know how to represent biology, understand the language of biology... we can represent the language of chemistry. Now we're going to have incredible tools that bring the world of biology, which is very chaotic and constantly changing and very diverse and complex obviously... and bring it into the world of computer science. And that is going to be profound, and so if you happen to love this intersection, I think it's going to be rich with opportunities... it's going to be a giant industry.
I've been watching the fields of CRISPR, RNA-interference, and Immuno-Oncology (using a person's own immune system to fight their cancer) for a decade and the progress often seems painfully slow given our advances in the genomic revolution. With the power tools of GPU "massively parallel architectures" in the hands of scientists, the pace is about to quicken exponentially.
This is how science works. My job is to inspire kids to work in, around, or even on the fringes of anything massively cool like this that will change our understanding of the universe and ourselves. Even kids who don’t care (now) about biology or physics could be fascinated by robots and the chance to design, build, program, or maintain them. Learning about NVIDIA tools and software platforms, including the simulation magic shop known as Omniverse, could ignite their curiosity about all aspects of STEM.
I grew up watching the wonderful Carl Sagan teaching me the ways of the universe and science. He wanted to find aliens too. But he knew we had to look “out there” with SETI. And I can’t imagine a better protege than Neil de Grasse Tyson, author of the new To Infinity and Beyond, continuing to show us the way. His books, podcasts, interviews and videos are like a masterclass on how to think clearly about science and technology. More on NDT coming up!
The link above will give you a free PDF copy of the first 5 chapters of my exciting new book. Right now, the title uses the word "Paradox" instead of "Delusion" as a nod to the Fermi Paradox. I haven't decided which way to go as I finish writing it. But you get to help!
Join Me in Building the First STEM Lab & Flight Studio
In a prior edition, I told you about the exciting new real estate development in the heart of Kenosha, Wisconsin on the site of the old AMC/Chrysler plant.
The Kenosha Innovation Neighborhood (KIN) will revitalize that 107 acres with world-class facilities any city would be proud of. Here’s how they describe the plan…
The KIN is a collaborative, mixed-use project that is defining and delivering a regional destination with sustainable, innovation-focused office, medical, educational, commercial, residential and recreational space that meets the unique needs of neighbors, the broader Kenosha community, visitors and end-users.?
What interests me most are (1) the new STEM-centered high school and (2) the Innovation Center which will have office space for tech entrepreneurs. I don’t know the admission requirements for the high school, but I plan to do everything in my power to get kids in there who want and deserve to go -- or give them an alternative if they can’t.
Regarding the Innovation Center office space, that building won’t open for another year. And I’m not waiting that long to build my vision of a Youth STEM Lab & Flight Studio.?
So here’s the deal…
I am raising money to lease an office in Kenosha where I can work on two primary goals 20+ hours per week:
Since I conceived of the Flight Studio in 2021, I’ve missed 3 summers of free flights and ground school for kids who might not even know the opportunity exists. And if a kid doesn’t want a free flight, they might still be ignited about how aviation works and if they could find a place within it -- or any aspect of aeronautics, space exploration, planetary science, earth science, or engineering.?
And since I conceived of the Learning Design Engine in 2017, I’ve missed 7 years of development, networking and capital raising. As many of us have learned since 2020, a knowledge strategist or creator not having a dedicated office workspace is a lot like a scientist or inventor not having a lab, or even a dedicated garage. Now it’s time for me to find that Technical Lead!
Since I’ve spent the last 5 editions of this newsletter singing the virtues of investing in Kenosha real estate, just 10 miles from the Microsoft-Foxconn Technology Complex, I am also actively looking for buildings to buy -- especially around the Kenosha Innovation Neighborhood. If you are an active real estate developer, investor, or commercial broker, let's talk about finding undiscovered locations in Kenosha.
A Few Words About Our Economy Awash in Trillions of Capital
I just found a Government Accountability Office (GAO) study from April with some stunning facts and numbers. The GAO Fraud Risk Management study reveals the shocking lede right in their title…
I’m not naive when it comes to corruption. I’ve worked in financial markets for 30 years and so I’d like to think I’ve seen it all. In fact, in 2008 I published my first article about the psychology of “rogue traders” that goes far beyond mere greed to issues involving ego, immaturity, and poor probability skills. I said regardless of regulations and controls, this type of behavior would never cease because while technology changes almost everything, it doesn’t alter good ‘ole human nature.
Six months after I published Mental Models of Financial Sabotage the world learned of Bernie Madoff. And not to be outdone by the WeWork guy (Adam Neumann) or the Theranos girl (Elizabeth Holmes), SBF had to go and top everybody with his crypto FTX implosion.?
While SBF gets to be the poster boy for crypto irrational exuberance, it appears “no one is to blame” for the implosion of the Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) which financed many of these craziest ideas under the sun. SVB had about $209 billion in total assets at the time of its collapse, making it the second-largest bank failure in US history. The conventional wisdom, courtesy of the search engine Perplexity, is that “SVB's failure was not due to fraud but rather to a combination of factors including interest rate risks, concentrated customer base, and a bank run.”
So I get it. Wall Street is, and always has been, a massive machine for funneling money to all kinds of ideas and operators, no matter how bad they are. You need look no further than the recent rash of real estate failures in multifamily apartment syndications that were financed on floating rate debt. To stay up to date daily on these “back to the bank” implosions, be sure to follow Shashankh Aryal @aryal1994 on X.
But what I can’t get over is $233 to $521 billion per year being stolen from the US government. How are these amounts consistently possible? I didn’t read the report because I’m afraid I’ll be too sickened by the details of the negligence and deceit. Because I’m still here wondering how I can’t get a measly $1 million in funding for a great idea in youth STEM education… from a government science program designed to improve society with original ideas.?
Your Youth STEM Call to Action
So I’m unabashed about asking for help and money to build my dream for youth STEM education.
Please visit this “STEM Lab Founders Hub” I built to introduce the mission-vision-purpose of the Youth STEM Lab & Flight Studio.
There you will find a way (even $20 will help) to support the launch of this essential facility. And I think you can see, once we do it in one city, we can duplicate it anywhere we like.?
And eventually, I’ll organize this as a non-profit so we can seek corporate sponsorship of Youth STEM Lab & Flight Studio centers across the country.?
For now, it’s going to be all grass-roots. So as a special kick-off, at the STEM Lab Founders Hub, you won’t see the exclusive reward choices below. These are just for you, a subscriber to Multifamily Investing, and anyone you share this edition with.?
Since your contributions are guaranteed to be used the way you intend, I’ll be in touch with details on your rewards and acknowledgement…
If we can raise $10,000 this week, then I’ll use 10% for ads to take the campaign national and get some media interviews.?
Your Partner in Building STEM Futures,?
Kevin Brent Cook