Deloitte, a professional service provider with offices in Detroit, has assembled a team to bring science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) to middle and high school students in underserved communities across the U.S. through its Smart Factory Believers program.
The firm will be working with Siemens Digital Industries Software in Livonia, Amazon Web Services (AWS0, Ballmer Group, Elenco Electronics, the National Math & Science Initiative (NMSI), and Wichita State University (WSU). The goal is to create high-quality STEM education programs for students in diverse and underserved communities.
Smart Factory Believers originally was created for The Smart Factory @ Wichita, Deloitte’s U.S. immersive experience center and proving ground for next-generation, digitally driven manufacturing. It is located on WSU’s innovation campus.
The program is designed to help remove systemic barriers that prevent students from accessing STEM learning and help teachers with the skills needed to provide education for students that help them visualize and achieve jobs in the manufacturing industry.
There is a critical gap between the technology and manufacturing jobs that need to be filled and the talent pool able to fill them. According to a Deloitte and The Manufacturing Institute ” report, this skills gap may leave 2.4 million manufacturing jobs unfilled between 2018 and 2028.
At the same time, Deloitte research shows that only 10 percent of the manufacturing workforce identifies as a minority, and the National Science Foundation reports that less than one-quarter of the Black (18 percent) and Hispanic (20 percent) workforce have careers in a STEM field. Further, according to America Succeeds, financially disadvantaged and minority students are less likely to have access to high-quality STEM resources.
The Deloitte-led Smart Factory Believers program is meant to create an opportunity to bring together these gaps in access to STEM resources and instruction by facilitating equitable access to education, teacher training, and driving interest in STEM careers — particularly those in manufacturing — to help resolve the workforce shortage and inspire the next generation of diverse talent to engineer the future.
The Believers program provides students and teachers in Title I-eligible schools with hands-on resources, including Smart Rover kits, a customized version of Elenco’s popular Snap Circuits R/C Snap Rover educational vehicle building kit; a culturally responsive curriculum; and robust educator training to give students a hands-on way to learn how to build, code, and operate a fully functioning mobile robot.
Once students build the Smart Rover, they can follow guided project challenges and lessons from the NMSI curriculum to power it using electrical circuits. The curriculum also helps them apply Python coding language to program their robot to complete various tasks, including autonomous driving, and image detection.
The program provides schools with math and science materials aligned to Common Core standards, teacher lesson plans, student guides, video modules, and all the technology accessories required for the projects.
The Believers program is currently active in more than 75 middle and high schools in Michigan, Arizona, California, Georgia, Illinois, Kansas, New Mexico, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Washington, D.C.
The program will continue to expand in 2023. Since it was established, the Believers program has distributed more than 2,250 Rover kits, which have impacted more than 10,000 students to date, 83 percent of whom are eligible for free or reduced-cost lunches, and 89 percent of whom identify as Black/African American, Hispanic/Latino, American Indian/Alaska Native, and Asian. The initial results as of June 2023 show that the Believers program has:
- Increased student interest in STEM: Students in the Believers program reported they enjoyed engaging in hands-on learning (70 percent), programming (60 percent), and working with technology (60 percent).
- Encouraged new paths for student leadership and peer engagement: As a result of the program, more than half (53 percent) of teachers report that their students have become more autonomous and collaborative.
- Helped 100 percent of educators trained via the program achieve STEM Common Core standards in a new way.
One of the first groups of students to experience the program are high schoolers from the Wayne-Westland Community School District in the Detroit area.
Inspired by the curriculum and work they completed through the Believers program; students were able to bridge the gap between novice and experienced programming and further their understanding of the mechanics of robotics construction.
This enabled the students to take their STEM skills to the next level. They qualified and competed against other schools at a national level at the 2023 FIRST Robotics Championship, where they placed 65 out of 77 teams and received a safety award from a peer team, and a diversity, equity, and inclusion award for the diversity of their team.
“When we built The Smart Factory @ Wichita, we wanted to use The Factory floor production line to make a product with purpose — thus the inception of the Smart Factory Believers program,” says Michael Gretczko, program executive sponsor of Smart Factory Believers and principal for Deloitte Consulting. “Like The Smart Factory itself, the Believers program is made up of a community of top organizations to make meaningful progress in creating new pathways to STEM education and equity, while igniting a passion for areas that students may have not yet explored. “
In addition to the Smart Factory Believers program’s U.S. initiatives, Deloitte is inaugurating similar STEM projects in the growing network of Deloitte Smart Factory experience centers across the globe. To learn more about the Smart Factory Believers program or to inquire about participating, visit here.