EP 39 | Helping kids get into STEM with Ben Finio from Science Buddies

A Transcript to our Conversation:

Mike:
Everybody, thank you so much for joining us. Today, I’ve got the pleasure of speaking with Ben Finio. He does a lot of really interesting things. He’s a lecturer at Cornell University, he’s got his PhD in Engineering Sciences and he is working as a staff scientist with Science Buddies, which is a really interesting organization that I’d like to learn a lot more about personally and that’s kind of why I wanted to invite Ben on the call so we can kind of talk about what he’s doing.

t’s a really neat organization working in kind of the STEM space for younger audience who’s really interested in kind of reaching out and getting people into STEM stuff. I think that’s about what Science Buddies is doing, but I met Ben, we were in a virtual conference and I noticed in the background he had a bunch of wires and hook up stuff and I’m like, “Oh, I got to talk to Ben. He’s doing something cool.” So that’s why I wanted to reach out. So Ben, thanks so much for giving us your time. Welcome.

Ben:
Thank you.

Mike:
You know, Ben, I’m really kind of interested in Science Buddies, if you could just tell us a little bit more about the organization and how you’re involved in it?

Ben:
Sure. So Science Buddies has actually been around since 2001 and I like to say we worked from home before it was cool. We’ve actually been a fully remote organization pretty much for the last 20 years. So we’re a nonprofit, all our resources are free. Science Buddies was originally founded really focused on science fairs, but as things have kind of expanded and the maker movement and STEM wasn’t really as much of a buzzword in the early 2000s, but it’s become more of the STEM movement in the last decade or so. So we have expanded our YouTube channel quite a bit. I mean, YouTube didn’t exist in 2001, we didn’t have videos originally. We have classroom lesson plans as well now, whereas originally we were focused on kids doing, usually a single student, doing a science fair project at home. Now we have stuff aimed at teachers or parents who are doing stuff at home with their kids.
So we are very broad. I think that there are over a thousand projects on our site and electronics in Arduino is one part of that. So our tagline is kind of A to Z astronomy to zoology. We also have biology, chemistry, physics projects. We’re a very small team. It’s pretty… I mean, I’m the engineer so I do a lot of our engineering. Physical sciences stuff, we have somebody who does a lot of the chemistry and life sciences stuff and then somebody who does, again, more physics oriented things. So we’re very small. The company’s only about 10 people overall.

Mike:
So Science Buddies is a resource then out there for somebody for like a… Is it mostly focused on teachers now then, giving teachers the resources?

Ben:
It’s a pretty healthy mix of parents, teachers and students. So, there will be students who need to do a science fair project for school but have trouble thinking of an idea. Just kind of like how Netflix recommends movies, we recommend science projects. You answer a bunch of questions, do you like video games? Do you like animals? Do you like sports? Cause I think students have an easier time answering those questions than asking do you like chemistry or do you like math? Once you then can align them a project with their interests like, “Oh, you like cooking, you can actually do chemistry experiments with baking,” or something like that. Our focus is almost entirely on hands-on science. So we don’t do worksheets and reading assignments. Everything is… Pretty much everything is focused on an experiment that you can physically do. There’s a big spectrum of that.
On one end there’s what can you do with what you have at home? Baking soda and paper and tape, very low cost materials and then that goes up to things like “I want to build a robot or a catapult,” or something where you need to buy or scavenge supplies. So again, we try to have a very, very broad offering, so somebody can kind of come and find what works for them, but the other side of that is we mostly have one off projects and not a curriculum. So for example, I was looking at your site, you have these entire Arduino courses, right that start with the fundamentals and then go through different projects. We don’t really do that. We’ll have a one off, “Here’s how to build an Arduino robot,” and then maybe here’s some links, “Okay, you need to learn how to use a breadboard, you need to learn how to use a multimeter, we’ll have individual resources for those things, but we don’t have a “Here’s a six week curriculum you go through.”

Mike:
Right, right.

Ben:
So a lot of it is teachers who “Oh, I’m teaching this topic in school and I want something hands on that my kids can do.” Or especially during the pandemic, parents who were suddenly trapped at home with their kids and we’re looking for something their kids could do. So that there’s a lot of different users.

Mike:
My wife and I were in that situation during the pandemic. I think for the first year we ended up doing a homeschool kind of mix thing, which was really quite difficult. And the science stuff we were doing was pretty lame, I got to admit, and I wish I would’ve found Science Buddies because I was playing around. And you mentioned it briefly, Ben, but I wanted to circle back to it, you mentioned the… there’s a questionnaire on the site, it’s like a recommendation engine is what it sounds like. And you know, there really is a lot of questions. So I went through just as a parent, I put myself as in a parent, answered some questions and stuff like that and I like how you guys ask the questions, you know what I mean? It’s not like I have to say I am or I’m not. You give me like “Yeah, I’m sort of or maybe I have no clue if I’m interested in it.” I felt like there was enough questions that it’s not some kid going through that is going to have to click yes to some of those. You know what I mean?
It wasn’t like you said, it’s not “Do you like science?” I don’t know. It was more “Do you like to play sports or do you like to…” I don’t know. So I was really impressed by that recommendation engine. And then I loved the results I got, like you said, one was, it was about flying drones and I was like…. You could have a small drone because they make those drones so inexpensive anymore. But then it had a whole plan basically for how you can… does practicing flying a drone make you better? And it gave almost a curriculum that if I wanted to take my son out and fly the drone around and “Hey, is practice actually making you faster or not?” I don’t know, it was taking something like you said, really hands-on that I really think a kid would enjoy. So I don’t know., I was pretty excited about that. And then the other one was this one was a video and it was about where do I bite a vampire? And I was like, “Oh, that is a great tagline. What a good headline.” So that was fun.

Ben:
Again, we’ve been around for 20 years, a lot of what you would consider the more classic science fair… and baking soda and vinegar is the classic one that everybody’s done. So there’s a lot of that more classic stuff. But we also try to do a lot more cutting edge stuff like drones, we’re adding some machine learning stuff now, autonomous cars are a big one, so, topics that again, hopefully kids would have seen elsewhere on the internet or heard about in the news or something that again might grab their interest a little more than kind of those classic chemistry, physics, biology, experiments that they would see in school. But again, we’re not throwing the classic stuff out the window cause there’s still a lot of teachers who are interested in that stuff. So again, we try to have a very broad range of stuff people can choose from.

Mike:
Right. Absolutely. Another reason I wanted to have you on Ben is because I like that Science Buddies is really reaching out to younger people with STEM fields and I know a lot of people listening are probably… Everybody knows young people and a lot of the people listening are probably influencers in their lives, you know what I mean? And it’s like… So for me I am a electronics and programming enthusiast. I just, I love it. And when I can kind of get my kids into it and stuff, I have fun. Sometimes they like it, sometimes I drag them in. Sometimes they’re like, “Oh, this is going to be fun,” type thing. But I really enjoy that process of exposing them to this different stuff and letting them see what’s possible and I feel like having a vehicle like Science Buddies to maybe direct a kid to share with and stuff like that is just a really fun resource to have.
And I noticed that you, it looks like you’ve done a lot of stuff with educating young people or being… I don’t know, building curriculum for young people. Do you have any thoughts just in generally on what you think good, I don’t know, ways is to introduce STEM, which some people they’re afraid “No, I’m not smart enough.” I hear that a lot. “I’m not smart enough. I’m not good at math,” or this, whatever. I don’t know any thoughts there on approaching youth with this type of stuff?

Ben:
Yeah. I mean, I think lowering those barriers to enter where people think “Oh, I don’t…” And Arduino is great for this because the whole point is that you don’t need to have an engineering degree to use it, that’s the entire point of that movement. So I think it’s… Part of it is again, getting them maybe to realize that their interests, whether it’s cooking or sports or something, that what… Maybe they take a physics class, but then they don’t like learning projectile motion or something, but they like football. I’m like, “Oh, what angle should the quarterback throw the ball at for it to go the farthest,” or something, right? Don’t make the introduction so dry, I think. Rather than just writing down the equations and drawing the little physics diagram with the parabola and all that, talk about football or something they like.
And that idea that yeah, you don’t need… And I think there are now more and more role models with this, with maybe a couple decades ago, the role models were… all these engineers at NASA getting us to the moon, but they all have these fancy degrees and lots of equations, but you don’t need that to get started. And the same thing applies to adults. You have people who have been out of college for 20 years, I haven’t done math since 11th grade or whatever and they don’t think they can get into this stuff, but you can get into it because there’s so much beginner friendly stuff. So I think maybe that’s not an exhaustive list, but one is coupling it to their interests and two is making it a point that you don’t need, if you’re… You don’t need AP calc and physics or a college engineering degree or all of that to get into this stuff.

Mike:
Yeah, absolutely. I’m assuming that you’re very much part-time with Science Buddies then? Is that correct?

Ben:
So yeah, I am part-time with Science Buddies and part-time at Cornell. So I only teach one class. I teach a mechatronics class at Cornell, which is very closely related to all the Arduino stuff, but more at a college level.

Mike:
Okay.

Ben:
And using the solo scope and more of an introduction to the electrical engineering side of things.

Mike:
Okay. And I think you mentioned it’s a nonprofit, right? It’s a 50… what? 503-

Ben:
501-C3.

Mike:
Okay. Yeah, there you go. That’s cool. All right. And so you guys are relying on donations from… You guys get grants and that kind of thing or…?

Ben:
Yeah. So mostly corporate grants as opposed to government funding. So if you go on… I’d have to pull up the about us page on the Science Buddies website… Or no, there’s a sponsor’s page. It’s usually large… Yeah. Cisco, Mitsubishi, Toyota, Broadcom… Just reading through kind of the top list here, Broadcom, and this is where “and now thanks to our sponsors.” [inaudible 00:10:55] So, usually US based companies with some vested interest in a STEM workforce that they fund STEM nonprofits like us. And we’re a little different in that we are an entirely virtual organization. So again, our primary resource is the website. We don’t run boots on the ground summer camps or after school programs. Our resources get used by the people who run those programs, but there isn’t a physical Science Buddies location or summer camp that kids come to.

Mike:
Okay. I’m just curious, are there any projects up there that you think that are your favorites? I’m curious.

Ben:
I mean, I am clearly biased towards the robotics stuff since I wrote all of it.

Mike:
Yes.

Ben:
But I think we have a nice spectrum of…

Mike:
Let your bias shine, that’s okay. Tell me about the….

Ben:
I think there’s a nice spectrum from that elementary up to the middle or early high school level, even before they’re ready to program in Arduino. You can do some interesting behavior with a simple circuit, like a robot that’ll follow a flashlight around just without any programming at all. So just again, thinking about how do you get them started and think “Oh,” if they’re worried that programming is scary and they don’t want to have to deal with building the circuit and the programming all at once. I think there’s a lot of cool stuff. Have you ever seen the bristle box, the little vibrating robots on a toothbrush head?

Mike:
I have, yes.

Ben:
Okay.

Mike:
I absolutely love those things.

Ben:
So kind of one step up from that is this little light tracking circuit where you put two little photo resistors on the guy and two motors, and then you can get it to steer left and right. But there’s no Arduino on it, it’s just the kind of intelligence and the circuit that controls the speed of the two motors. And you put googly eyes on it, because the robots need googly eyes so it looks cute. That one’s been around for a while, maybe that’s one of my favorites.

Mike:
Yeah. I love the motion of those things. I don’t know if people have… I imagine most people have probably seen them.

Ben:
I mean, they’ve been around for close to 10 years at least I think. I think it was Evil Mad Scientist was the original website that kind of came up with the idea and then it kind of spread. Although I mean, there’s a toy now, the hex bug-

Mike:
That’s where I was introduced is through that toy because we got our kids a set of these toys and it’s like a track and you put this robot on the track and what’s so insane about it is it looks like… it really just looks like this insect organic motion, that it’s kind of creepy and you realize it’s just a little motor in there.

Ben:
There’s a whole field of robotics called swarm robotics and then the idea of collective… whether it’s a colony of ants or a flock of birds or a school of fish, this kind of collective motion where there’s no central controller, it’s just a bunch of individual units that have their own kind of navigation rules. And even for something like a bristle bot where there’s no intelligence at all, it’s just vibrating randomly, you can dump a swarm of these things and they’ll kind of form little blobs and move around. So it’s really cool to see when you have enough of them they’ll kind of form groups and kind of do collective things just by the nature of kind of how they vibrate and connect together. So yeah, they’re cool, but you need a lot of them to do that.

Mike:
That’s cool. So what do you see as the future of Science Buddies? Are you guys… Do you have a certain… You’re going to keep doing more of the same or are you planning on doing more boots on the ground stuff or not? What are your thoughts there?

Ben:
So I’d say probably not boots on the ground, but we are again, continuing to expand the types of online content we offer. So I think you mentioned one of these earlier, the newest thing we just launched is video lessons where we’ve had written lesson plans for teachers before, but say you have a teacher who really isn’t comfortable in the subject area at all and kind of delivering the material themselves to students, so it’s more of a video that delivers the material and gives the students the instructions. We do partner more directly with some organizations that do run kind of contests or boots on the grounds thing. The biggest one is the Floor Engineering Challenge that just wrapped up. It’s a contest we’ve run for the last I think six years, where students from mostly in the US, but from all over the world, build like a catapult or a tower or some kind of engineering challenge with defined rules at home with simple materials and then they submit… We can’t run a contest in person, but they have to submit pictures and documentation of what they build and how they calculate their score based on rules we came up with.
That’s a really fun one because some of the pictures students send in are crazy. We had this… I forget if this was last year or two years ago, build a tower out of nothing but paper and tape that can hold a can of food at the top, like a can of beans so it has to be kind of sturdy. And we had kindergartners who submit their little one piece of paper high tower, but there were kids who had to use a ladder. They submitted pictures of these 12 foot high towers and I think they could only use 30 pieces of paper and one roll of tape. So the kids built these crazy structures with this limited amount of tape.
And then same thing with… Build a catapult out of Popsicle sticks and paper cups and rubber bands or whatever the simple materials are. And your younger kids have fun with it and get something that launch a few feet. And then we get videos of kids who are shooting it down the hallway at their middle school. They built these crazy… Again, that existed before the pandemic, but then especially when the pandemic hit and people were desperately looking for what is some hands-on thing I can do with my kids at home or for kids who are learning remotely and we can give them this assignment from school, but then they have the materials to do it at home. That’s an example where we don’t just put the instructions online, we do a little more formally kind of run a contest and encourage entries for something like that.

Mike:
Okay. That’s pretty cool. I noticed on the website, there was a place where it had an “ask an expert.” What is that kind of about?

Ben:
So that is mainly a forum for students who have questions about specifically science projects that they’re doing. So it’s not really intended to be a general anybody can come ask any science question type forum. It’s four K through 12 students who are doing a science project and maybe they’re trying at home and their parents don’t know how to help them with something or maybe they can’t get help from their science teacher on a specific topic. So that is mainly staffed by volunteers so that the Science Buddies staff do check it and kind of jump in when we need to, but we have a few volunteers from various scientific engineering industries who kind of check the forums and will answer kids.
But it’s again, it’s… we occasionally get people who… I think it comes up if you Google science questions or something, it comes up as one of the top forums sometimes. So, we get adults who will stray in with questions about time travel or faster than light travel or something and we kind of have to politely go “This forums for kids doing science projects. There are better places where you might be able to go ask that.”

Mike:
Yes. Oh, that’s great. Yeah. I just, I love that there are so many great resources out there now for young people getting into STEM and science. So with Science Buddies, what do you see as the biggest… is there particular lessons that seem to become the most popular? I’m just curious, just generally speaking across the website, is there… Wow. it seems like kids are really interested in, I don’t know biology or kids are more interested or this or that, is there kind of a direction there?

Ben:
Yeah, we definitely… Again, it’s a little easier to see this on YouTube just since the metrics are public, you can go to any video and see which one is the most popular. And we definitely see seasonal popularity with some things, there can be projects lined up. We have five experiments you can do with peeps thing that gets really popular around Easter every year, but then kind of fades out for the rest of the year. And again, a lot of those simple paper rockets, paper towers, paper bridges, anything where you just need paper, because that’s the one supply every school has, I think a lot of that stuff gets really popular. A lot of that cooking and food science stuff, we have a video on popping Boba. I was never a big bubble tea person or the little juice ball things, but there’s again how to make those and the chemistry behind making those, I think that’s taken off recently.
So it’s interesting again, having been around for a while to kind of see those trends in some topic that might… again drones and autonomous cars are really hot right now, but five, 10 years ago, they weren’t. So you can kind of see those surges of interests in different topics kind of relate more correlated with broader societal trends and interests, which is kind of cool. I guess I should have… I talked about people doing stuff at home during the pandemic, but we also had a bunch of pandemic inspired projects. There’s things like you can put glow paint on your hands and see how well you actually wash your hands and where you have paint left. How coughing and seeing how far droplets go, all that sort of stuff. We also have basically a pandemic simulator that lets you put in all the are not value and how many people are vaccinated and all that stuff. And then we’ll kind of give you a graph of what do infections look like over the next year?
So, we came up with that early on and then all the variants started happening so it became interesting “Okay, what happens if you go in and tweak these numbers to make it more similar to a different variant.” That’s called SimPandemic, that’s there on the homepage now. We have so much stuff that sometimes it’s easy for me to just forget, “Oh yeah, we also have this and this and this.” I could babble about it for… And right now we have our social media person does all our social media, but also runs the blog that kind of gathers collections of activities with different themes and right now the featured one… I keep mentioning paper. So right now there’s a list of 12 paper science activities, so stuff you can do mostly with just paper, but again, then there’s the holiday related ones or everything that has to do with Newton’s laws of motion. There’s all these different collections where maybe if you are…
Again, if you’re just kind of Googling or searching on a site and finding these projects one at a time, but you would be interested on a cluster of them, she collects… There’s Mother’s Day STEM activities, crafty things. I’m just looking through some of the recent ones. Rainbow things, colorful things, cooking things. So again, a lot of, I think… Those are usually more geared at teachers who are looking for kind of a… a kid’s not going to do all 12 of them, but if a teacher wants to have kind of a library of lessons with a certain theme, they’ll find those.

Mike:
Yeah. That’s neat. Well, this has been really interesting, Ben. I appreciate you taking the time to talk and I know people listening, like I said, ar… lots of people love sharing their passion and their hobby and a lot of people listening I’m sure are just passionate people about what they’re doing and they like sharing it. And so I’m sure they’re going to… I know I’ll be sharing Science Buddies with people I run into, probably some teachers in the school that I run into and stuff.

Ben:
That’d be great.

Mike:
So this has been fantastic. I really appreciate it.

Ben:
Yeah. Thanks. And again, feel free… I mean, you already have my email. If you ever need something specific on the Science Buddies site or have a teacher who’s looking for something or has a question feel free to just email me or give them my email.

Mike:
All right. Fantastic. Thank you so much, Ben.

Ben:
Okay, cool. Thank you.

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