[00:00:00]
Ben Newsome: You’re listening to the Fizzics Ed Podcast. For hundreds of ideas, free experiments and more, go to fizzicseducation.com.au. And now, here’s your host, Ben Newsome.

[00:00:20]
Ben Newsome: Welcome again for another Fizzics Ed Podcast. Glad to have you again and in this particular chat, we are hanging out with someone who I very much respect when it comes to making STEM truly happen, like really happen. I want you to take the time to listen deeply to what Adam Low has to say about making STEM projects happen with community partners. He is the director of the University of Alaska Fairbanks Upward Bound programme and he’s also director of T3 Alaska. Now, T3 stands for Teaching Through Technology, which is an amazing programme which is really involving an amazing number of students in producing real STEM outcomes for their community through the T3 Alliance.

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Ben Newsome: He is such a passionate educator. He loves doing these community education projects and he has extensive experience in making all sorts of curriculum-support STEM technologies and service learning just through the T3 Alliance and through the Modern Blanket Toss National Science Foundation grants. He has worked as a teacher in makerspaces in all sorts of places and trust me, he really knows what he’s talking about because in 2008, he was named Science Teacher of the Year for the state of Alaska. So, without any further ado, please listen to Adam Low and learn a little bit about making STEM happen for your community.

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Ben Newsome: This is the Fizzics Ed Podcast for all about science, edtech and more. To see 100 fun free experiments you can do with your class, go to fizzicseducation.com.au. That’s physics spelled F-I-Z-Z-I-C-S and click “100 free experiments”.

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Ben Newsome: Mate, really happy to have a chat with you. We hung out only a couple of weeks ago now. Gosh, it’s only a month ago in Florida. Wasn’t that some fun?

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Adam Low: That was fun. That was great.

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Ben Newsome: So look, you’ve been heavily involved in STEM for many years and we’ve gotten to know each other, but not everyone has had a chance or a privilege to meet you yet. So Adam, tell me a bit of—who are you, what do you do, all that sort of thing?

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Adam Low: Well, thank you. Okay, so I am a lifelong educator. I started out as a geologist, actually, and very shortly into geology I recognised that the most fun you had in geology was sometimes helping the other people in the office who were learning to do GIS and use different kinds of technologies.

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Adam Low: And I converted my focus there into being a high school science teacher or a middle school science teacher. And that process of knowing what it was needed in industry and how the geology world was always looking for ways of telling the story of the land around us kind of brought me down the pathway of getting into place-based education.

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Adam Low: And that led from—I had the good fortune of getting to teach in South America for a few years at international schools and then coming back and teaching in a rural Alaska community, a small fishing community where the students from that community were either going to go up and be fishermen making money like their parents were, or some of them wanted to get out of town.

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Adam Low: And what was always fascinating is how students that are from a town think that, “Oh, if I could just get out of this town, then I’d really get to see stuff.” And it was as I moved to different places—South America or Alaska, or then after Alaska I moved and taught in a rural community culturally focused charter school in Hawaii for a number of years, where in all of those environments, the students had this perspective that somehow where they were wasn’t as cool as where it could be outside of us.

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Adam Low: And really taking education and saying, “What can we do in our science class to understand the world around us?” And that involves sensors when you have sensors, it involves field trips when you have field trips, it involves community partners when you can talk to community partners and get them to be part of the story.

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Adam Low: And then the part that I think eventually led to some awards and recognitions for me was that I recognised that researchers are craving opportunities to be partnering with students in communities. So when I would get my students to the point where they could pick up a phone and call the university, “I’m noticing this out here” or “Hey, we’re excited about this, can we talk more about this?” then the floodgates started opening up of research opportunities.

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Adam Low: And I’d say my first kind of explosion into the world of doing partnerships with research organisations happened with a grant on utilising methane or biogas digesters to collect food scraps and put it all in a thing to be able to offset the propane costs at our local cafeteria. And students co-wrote a grant that was for $250,000. It was enough to make those students go around the state giving presentations, talking about things. And it was during that time that I got to meet some of the state leaders in different education areas.

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Adam Low: And as just a science teacher from a small town, people remember those teachers who get out and do connected things. And it was during my following time in Hawaii, teaching at a different environment, where I was asked to be part of this new programme called the Modern Blanket Toss.

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Adam Low: And for a little context, and I know you haven’t asked me any questions, but I’m going to go through the story of how it got to where we are right now, because I think it’s contextual and it’s really got powerful things within it. The Modern Blanket Toss was a programme that was operated by the programme that I now work for. And I guess I should share that I’m the director of the Upward Bound programme at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

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Adam Low: Upward Bound, for those of you who don’t know, is a federally funded programme to help underserved high school students go to college and were first generation, low income. And there’s a lot of programmes across the United States in the US territories. But in this particular connection back to that story, my predecessor, the one who ran the Upward Bound programme before here, had written a National Science Foundation grant saying, “Hey, let’s try drones as a method to help students get excited about going into a STEM career field.”

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Adam Low: And the programme we operate here has 10 high schools around Alaska that we work with. They’re rural high schools. And they said five of them will get the treatment. Five of them will get drones and get teacher training and all this awesome stuff, and five of them won’t and we’ll study the difference.

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Adam Low: And of course, when students were working on those kind of projects, they brought me in as a curriculum expert, outside person to help the teachers know how to partner with community members to get students using the drones for more than just flying them around and being like, “Oh cool.” It was, “Let’s fly and find out whether people fall into the open lake holes with snow machines or whether or not we have flood dangers or things like that.”

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Adam Low: And that was so significant, the results from it there, that the National Science Foundation asked our predecessor to submit another grant that was called Teaching Through Technology. And that one is about taking that same principle, the same use some growth mindset, learn your tech skills and then apply things in a community engagement setting. And it took that idea and brought it to 32 other Upward Bound programmes spread across the United States, Puerto Rico, the Marshall Islands and other places.

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Adam Low: And it’s been about 10 years between when the Modern Blanket Toss started to the three years of this National Science Foundation grant that essentially brought tech equipment to all these different places, brought teacher trainings. And in each one of those different communities around the country, there were groups of educators essentially finding ways for students to be engaging with their community.

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Adam Low: And I’d say the one little twist that makes it different than other programmes I’ve heard of is that built into that grant and built into what has continued on since then is the idea that you keep a little bit of flexible funding built into that programme so that students in those sites can write their own mini-grants. After we go through the design thinking process to learn to listen, to empathise with the community partners, with people in the community who you just learn to find.

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Adam Low: They just come out of the woodwork when you’ve got a group of students who are excited about stuff. But somewhere along that pathway, after you define the problem, after you ideate on “what could possibly we do?”, there’s this moment where, “Oh, I’m going to have to build that. Where do I get the funding to build that?” And if they learn the process of writing a mini-grant and actually promising what the deliverables will be—”I promise to make a video,” “I promise to do all this other stuff”—then that’s the part that just grows.

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Adam Low: When other sites see this, when other community partners see this, they say, “I want more of that.” I can say that in the three years since the National Science Foundation has been finished, the programme has continued to survive, which usually for National Science Foundation grants, when the grant funding is over, it’s like, “Okay, the programme’s done.” But the fact that it’s still going, that there’s now a nonprofit that orchestrates a lot of the curriculum, the training, helps make sure that when we need to buy more equipment that we use, then it’s out there.

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Adam Low: And I’ve mentioned T3 Alliance so you can go find out about that on the T3alliance.org website. And there’s a wonderful group of people, including you, Ben, who are on the board of directors who are all in some aspect of how do we make education work in our world for the communities that we’re dealing with. And I feel like the underserved community is so important to focus on because oftentimes when we think of education, of STEM education, it’s like, “Hey, we’ll make an awesome science camp” and then somebody’s got to pay for it, so the rich kids end up going to those things and get this amazing experience and then we have a separation between those who have been through that pathway and others.

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Ben Newsome: Oh, it’s amazing. And what a journey by the way. And a lot to unpack in some ways, but gee, there’s a couple of things in there which I think that every educator globally could really get into. How often do we as adults go and find the grant, go and do the thing, the grant finishes and we move on with our lives until the next grant round opportunity turns up? I mean, I have these conversations frankly every couple of weeks with different places in different ways.

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Ben Newsome: What I love about what the whole thing about what you’re doing is partnering with research organisations and getting the students—here’s an idea—the students pick up the phone. Now that is actually challenging for a start to get the kids to literally pick up a phone, especially coming from a small town. I’m from a small town and like you kind of know people and the people you don’t know it’s like, “Oh, do I want to call them?” But getting them to actively be in charge of their learning and their outcomes, that is so cool.

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Adam Low: So, Ben, I think this is where, when I saw a few of the stories of what you’ve done with Fizzics Education and other things, I’m reminded of what good science education or good just education does. It helps a student feel safe to be themselves and to be doing things.

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Adam Low: It’s like we’re going to break down the barriers of there’s the grades that you have to work for or break down the barriers of only certain smart people can do coding or whatever. And it’s a journey. I’d say that when I start or when the T3 programme is evolved state-right now, when we start with a new community, it is very much like we’re at the baseline earning badges, we’re building baseline stuff.

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Adam Low: We build a computer, we start with this toothbrush robot. It’s called a brushbot. And you give it to students, talk to them a little bit about having a growth mindset. And then as they are successful in building that, the cheerleader part of you turns into helping them celebrate and feel like they were just a winner.

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Adam Low: We try to really cultivate that culture in the classroom to make sure that everyone in the classroom feels like we’re listening for words that are downers, the ones that will make you not feel safe in this environment. And I have found that there are communities where we walk into that have a larger amount of historical trauma that they’re dealing with. And dealing with teachers coming in and talking to them in the ways that you and I can get excited and talk to them, we use all our skills to make it fun and make it enjoyable and make it so that ultimately they feel safe there.

[00:14:45]
Adam Low: And then scaffolding that with, “Okay, what’s the next project?” where I know that I’m going to allow them to struggle, I’m going to allow them to feel a little bit like, “Oh man, I don’t know what I’m going to do,” but I’m going to ask somebody. And it’s cool, we’re going to ask somebody. And then after you get that to a certain point, it’s like you’re watching someone’s self-confidence rise and you’re watching someone’s just ability to affect change.

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Adam Low: And when they write the first mini-grant that’s in that process and they write it for the classroom or they write it for their own house, like being able to go home to your mom and say, “Grandma can’t turn the light switch on because she can’t walk very well, but I know how to turn a Raspberry Pi into a voice-activated light switch. Let me write the $134 mini-grant to set that up.” And now that kid is a hero in their own house.

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Adam Low: So you’ve got to think in terms of—well, and this is partly the power of the Upward Bound programme—it is a four-year commitment. When a student signs up in the end of 8th grade, we take them all the way through high school.

[00:16:10]
Adam Low: And that first year we recognise, “You know, you’re probably not going to be that student who’s going to call up a researcher.” But by the time year number three has happened and you’ve had five times that you’ve won along the way, you know that you’ve had celebrations.

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Adam Low: That’s part of what you can control as an educator is, if you hold an event and you make sure that group of students are really excited about presenting and the people who come to that event are the people who that kid cares about, then you can watch that kid puff out their chest and be like, “All right, I’m a leader and I have made a difference in this community.” And that is a drug. That is a drug that all of us hope that those students keep drinking and get and then say, “My gosh, that might lead to a college education. It might lead to me going and running for political office someday or starting a company that ends up doing like Fizzics Education all over the country and helping break down the barriers between science and those kind of things.”

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Adam Low: So I feel like the researchers like working with us because they’re like, “Hey, I fly into this small Alaska community or some other community and I have my cool project I’m working, maybe it’s a wind turbine, maybe it’s like a new thing to monitor earthquakes or something. And usually they’re left at, ‘Okay, if I ask nicely, I might get into the high school gymnasium and I can give a presentation.’ And then my presentation happens and then I say, ‘Bye everybody, I hope I’ve inspired you to be a science person later on.'”

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Adam Low: But the other side of it is that if there’s a small group who has chosen—and that’s something we have done in Alaska—we’ve kind of blurred the Upward Bound programme with these other funding agencies who have said, “I like what you’re doing, I want to expand it so that we can serve more than the 10 schools, more than the 160 students that my Department of Education grant that funds most of what my job is.”

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Adam Low: Outside agencies are able to pay and help facilitate more of those kind of experiences and broaden that opportunity so that we can have other communities that are following that same pathway. And then for the researchers who are investing in that or the research entities, Department of Defence or National Science Foundation or other groups, they get the benefit of knowing that the long-term investment of that group of students there, we track them over those four years.

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Adam Low: So we’re checking their grades, we’re checking, “Are you doing your FAFSA?” And FAFSA is the national US thing for getting free college money if you want to go on. But we do a number of things that are meant to help the social and emotional wellbeing of students as they try to transition from a world where college wasn’t on their radar or being a scientist wasn’t really their experience into that expectation.

[00:19:10]
Adam Low: And then again, it’s the power of moments thing. When you can get that scientist to be like, “Oh my gosh, I have a Zoom call with a group of students in Sitka and we’re going to talk about the thing I love,” then everybody wins. That group of students in Sitka walks around all the rest of the day going, “Oh man, I just talked to a scientist,” and that scientist is like, “I just got to work with a group of students and the teacher, and wow do I feel great about my job.”

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Adam Low: So I do feel like in my work now, it’s evolved from being the science teacher to being the matchmaker who just helps science teachers realise how important and awesome they are in their community and helps the research world or the other funding world people recognise how valuable the science teachers and administrators are.

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Adam Low: Because I will say one of the brilliant things that John Monahan, the guy who wrote the Modern Blanket Toss and the NSF Teaching Through Technology grant, he said you always need to have three things that go into a T3 programme. One is you need administrative buy-in.

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Adam Low: If you’re a renegade science teacher sitting out there trying to do place-based learning except you don’t have any support for field trips, you don’t have any support for your class looking messy—because when you get kids doing actual projects, it’s like hard to say what the day will look like on day 27 of your class because the students might be building something that they interviewed somebody and said it needs to happen.

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Adam Low: So your superpower as a teacher goes into, “Let me design ways to make sure that I’m still meeting the objectives of my curriculum and let me make sure that the students are having that emotional feeling of winning when they get a chance to work on things.”

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Ben Newsome: Oh for sure. I mean, I’m just thinking about the—really, there’s a certain training in audacity which is occurring, which I don’t think is fantastic. I mean, we often hear about solutionary thinking and all that sort of thing, which is incredibly important, but it’s so out there and so far removed from the kids’ day-to-day life that unless they’re empowered, unless they’re given a scaffold of meaning and several years behind them, we’re kind of just making stuff up.

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Ben Newsome: But I love the idea that students by the end of this—yeah of course the idea is that they’re getting to a college place and they go as members of the community of high value to themselves and to the community—but we’re really changing a mindset when you really think about it. Yes, it’s a STEM programme in a lot of ways, but the ability for a kid to write out a mini-grant… I mean, gosh, I know adults, plenty of adults who struggle with the idea of writing out a grant in some way, shape or form, to put their ideas on the line and get the money to make it happen.

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Ben Newsome: You’re talking 17-year-olds, 18-year-olds, you’re talking kids that are really significantly—hey, you talk about the mini-grants that’s not huge amounts of money to be able to help grandma who can’t turn the light on, but then at the same point not that long ago you describe a major programme with methane of all things. I mean, and that’s a significant thing. I mean, that’s some serious money to be able to do stuff. So these kids are coming out with a skill set at the administrative side without even realising it.

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Adam Low: Right. And as an Upward Bound director, I always have to be looking back at “Am I meeting my grant’s objectives?” which says you need to teach reading, writing and math in some part. And so in a way, managing a spreadsheet, managing the statistics that come out of any kind of research project, managing the stuff that happens with a well-done grant, a well-done community project, I can hit those things and with a straight face say that, yep, we’re meeting those objectives and goals.

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Adam Low: But I know that the part that’s hardest in teaching is to measure the—and it’s been called soft skills—you know, how do we empathise? How do we truly listen to our community members? How do we listen to each other in our class? How do we work as a team to solve a problem? Those are the things that can be built into a healthy, emotionally relevant programme.

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Adam Low: And I found that what my skill is in or what I try to train teachers to do is use your power to look for community partners who are perfect people to come in and share. And they need a little bit of training so they have some context because I have had community partners who come in and think, “Great, I got a class full of students who are going to do my job for me, so I’m just going to tell them all what to do,” and that falls flat on the face.

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Adam Low: So they come in and they share the story of what they’re really struggling with in their industry or in their topic.

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Adam Low: And this summer we—every year part of the Upward Bound programme, there’s a six-week summer programme that to me is like that’s your in-depth training, that’s your in-depth practice and stuff of students getting to live together, learn how to partner with community members, learn the technologies, learn how to set up things in a makerspace, all that kind of stuff.

[00:25:19]
Adam Low: But part of it is helping the community partners come in and say, “I’m dealing with issues in renewable energy with microgrids and I don’t know how to communicate with community members in ways that’ll make things happen.” So they don’t tell the student what they need to do, they just throw out the problem sets that they’re dealing with and the students wrestle and try to unpack and define and they go down a pathway of, “Hey, we need to call somebody from the Department of Energy or we need to do research here, we need to do this kind of stuff,” and kind of unpack it into a process that grows from there.

[00:26:01]
Adam Low: So yeah, I think that the barriers that are out there first and foremost are, do you work in an environment as a teacher, as an educator where you feel supported in that? And what’s happened here at the university level now as these students that I’ve worked with the last 10 years have gotten to college, they’ve come with this attitude of, “Hey, I can do stuff, I’m curious about a topic, I want to do stuff.”

[00:26:34]
Adam Low: So it’s been fun to watch as the engineering 100 entry-level engineering class has redefined itself so that it has space for students to work on projects with community partners as part of that entry-level course. And it’s a paradigm shift from the old “I’m a sage on the stage and you’re going to do the labs I tell you what to do,” it’s more like, “Here’s $300. You need to work with a partners in community members to figure out something that you’re proposing and you’re going to own the solution and the presentation and the report and the data that come along with it.”

[00:27:01]
Adam Low: It’s like you’ve taken the senior design thesis that normally comes at the end of a four-year engineering degree and you’ve put it into year one, but secretly it’s been part of the high school experience going forward. So those students who have already been in that, they’re like, “All right, I feel good about this and we’ll run.”

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Ben Newsome: What’s amazing next when you think about the focus when we’re running our lessons, well, the focus is the kids in a lot of ways. However, just bringing in the community partner, focusing on them for a moment is important because I can imagine exactly what you described—having an executive from a major corporation coming in and even allowing them to be openly vulnerable to say, “I’ve got myself a problem and I kind of don’t want to admit it but we do, and our problem is significant and it’s like this itch I can’t scratch. Can you do that for me, student?”

[00:27:51]
Ben Newsome: Which is an interesting even idea even consider because I mean you’d often pay someone who’s got 30 years experience and bucket of letters after their name to solve said problem. And now you’re dealing with students in college or high school and saying, “Hey, I’ve got myself a problem” and lo and behold every now and then the kids actually genuinely solve it.

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Adam Low: Right. So that is—after I was with you in Florida, I ended up going to a national conference in Oregon, or a regional conference in Oregon, and then I went to Hawaii where I got a chance to meet with one of the—it’s a venture capitalist investment group that does stuff in the aquaculture industry.

[00:28:23]
Adam Low: And it was fascinating listening to him sharing that in their job they are looking for the entrepreneurs, the ones who can make tech transfer, and then they like to invest in that group of individuals. So they’re doing all sorts of stuff where they bring in people, they call it an accelerator programme, and then they say, “Oh, I see you look like a good idea, I’m going to give you lots of energy and focus and training and then I’m going to help you build your idea into a million-dollar something.”

[00:28:52]
Adam Low: But what comes to mind there is a lot of my experience has been with researchers who have existing federal grants where there’s a part of that grant that says, “I need to do outreach after I do my work.” And so to them, T3 or a connected group of high school students, no problem, that’s great. But the industry partners, the ones who are saying, “I’m trying to grow a shellfish growing operation here in Alaska that’s never been done before and I’m running into all sorts of problems.”

[00:29:34]
Adam Low: Now that’s a partner that when they come and meet with that group of students—and it’s great to have national big partners, ones who are like I’m all over the place—but when we think of like starting small, just like we start in our classroom and then work our way up, the ones who are local who can come and sit in your classroom and say, “You know, I’m a farmer and climate is changing and I just cannot keep on top of it. So I’m going to have to think of something different and I’m fresh out of ideas. Can I bring you to my farm, show you around and let you guys work on this?”

[00:30:08]
Adam Low: And then that invitation is like your human connection there. And I’ve tried capturing videos and things like that of people from faraway places talking about the importance of measuring methane in rural Alaska because it is a big issue. But the more powerful ones happen when there’s somebody that you’re connected with.

[00:30:32]
Adam Low: And when we come to a summer programme or we come to a big conference or one of those things, that’s when a keynote person or as we organise ourselves better to craft those messages for the sticky problems that are facing our industry, then I think as students move up that pipeline, they get better and better at listening, forming groups and drafting up grants that go way beyond the mini-grant ideas that we’re putting there.

[00:30:53]
Ben Newsome: For sure. And it gets me thinking about where does this all lead? Because I mean when you’ve got so many sites doing so many individual things and loosely stitched together under T3 Alliance and Upward Bound and doing all this sort of stuff, where—like this 10 years down the track now, so what if we go 10 years again? Like where does this go next?

[00:31:18]
Adam Low: Oh, where would it go next? I love that question. And I do think of myself as a futurist. You know, as a teacher you have to do that. You have to be saying, “I see this group of students in front of me, where could we be a year from now if everything worked out perfectly and what’s those barriers to make it happen?”

[00:31:45]
Adam Low: But as I look at, you know, first Alaska because that’s where I am and that’s where I am directly connected to the 14 schools around Alaska, some of which have been grant funded, some of which are paying for themselves to be part of a T3 site, I want every state, every region, every place around our country to have the kind of local regional orchestration that I watch happen in other healthy organisations like the Trio Association.

[00:32:25]
Adam Low: That’s the one that runs all the Upward Bound programmes. It’s like the network, the club of Upward Bound programmes and they’ve got ones for each state and then they have ones for regions and then they have a national one.

[00:32:50]
Adam Low: T3 is already sort of doing that with there’s T3 Alaska, there’s T3 Hawaii, there’s T3 England, T3 Australia at some point. And in each one of those, having a really good core product, and our product being impact, that we know that with this set of activities, loosely done set of activities with this kind of technique of delivering it, creating that safe emotional learning environment, then it can grow into what it looks like in its own community.

[00:33:14]
Adam Low: And as we think of it moving more from it’s like a few orchestrated things to national hubs or international hubs doing cool things, then when we have conferences, it’s like a big learning-fest where students presenting about work they’re doing, when educators present about ways they’ve done it in different ways. I mean, we need to have enough constraint on it so that we don’t lose our control on what we call quality.

[00:33:47]
Adam Low: When I’ve learned as a teacher and as an outsider that just because we call a site a T3 site and we run in there and send them a bunch of equipment, it doesn’t equate to a healthy T3 programme. Defining what a healthy T3 programme, I think is—that’s the role that T3 Alliance is doing right now and they’re getting more and more and more on that.

[00:34:04]
Adam Low: But as each individual community tweaks it slightly and makes it different, then it’s going to have its flavour. And I think we’re adaptable enough to be able to incorporate things like what you’re doing with those awesome shows that happen and pull students in to get them kind of hooked. And I just look forward to not being too much in control, but being enough in control to say that we can envision a time when we’re collaborating, working and creating as many pathways for students to be moving into a meaningful contribution to the world that they live in.

[00:34:39]
Adam Low: And that means you’re going to college or not, it just means I want to do something that’s important and feel good about it.

[00:34:50]
Ben Newsome: 100%. And you’re right. As you think about the structure that’s already been established, and my gosh, there is some good structure, there really is. And so if you really are curious, just type in T3 Alliance into any form of search thing, you’ll find it, you’ll find the information because it has that capacity to do global good. It really does.

[00:35:15]
Ben Newsome: I mean, what I like about it is it’s the—okay, it’s a throwaway saying “Think globally, act locally,” but that’s exactly what’s actually going on here because when you’ve got a rigorous training so to speak for the educators involved, but loose enough for local things to happen with local community partners, that’s going to grow quickly when we sort of think about it.

[00:35:39]
Ben Newsome: Absolutely. So I mean, I’m actually just thinking then from an advice standpoint. Just say they’re in Vietnam somewhere, because you didn’t list that country so it came to my head. So Vietnam it is. So Vietnam. And there’s someone listening going, “You know what, I really would like to do this sort of work and I don’t know the first step.” What would that be? What would be the advice for someone who’s super passionate but needs help and guidance on that first step? What would that be?

[00:36:13]
Adam Low: Yeah, boy. You know, I’d say going and just clicking through the T3 Alliance website will give you more education on the story that we’ve unpacked and what I’ve shared here in today. And learning from books, learning from if place-based education, if meaningful, how do I empower students to do things that are in this kind of pathway of what we’ve been talking about today, I’d say first educate yourself to the point where you can bring an administrator in with this.

[00:36:49]
Adam Low: Because by yourself, you can be a renegade “my own private Idaho” kind of teacher where it’s like I’m going to close my little classroom. And I think many, many amazing elementary school teachers are in this boat, you know, it’s like, “Hey, I can make a mini society, I can make all sorts of stuff and they’ll figure it out.”

[00:36:58]
Adam Low: But when you’re in a high school or a collegiate environment, there’s a lot of structures and constraints there and administration that’s been meant intentionally to make it so that the ship doesn’t move very quickly very easily. But that’s not to say that there isn’t a lot of brain research and there isn’t a lot of data supporting the power of these kind of movements.

[00:37:32]
Adam Low: And there’s other examples of programmes that do similar things. Project Lead the Way, I don’t know all of the ones right off the top of my head because I live, breathe T3. But I know that if becoming more effective in the work that you do with students is your goal, then getting the structures that help make students feel safe in that learning environment, figuring out what are those checkmarks as students get up to that capacity level to where they know how to use some technologies.

[00:38:15]
Adam Low: And students, you know, we know for—it’s an old adage of can’t figure out your VCR, show it to a student, or can’t figure out a phone, show it to a student kind of thing. Well, allow them to feel that superpower of “I know technology, I can figure it out.” And then, and then, how do we engage with our community? And the more that you start down that pathway small, make a difference in your school, make a difference in your town, make a difference at your own home, you’ll kind of build that social fluency that turns into, “All right, I’m ready to go and make a difference.”

[00:38:53]
Adam Low: And I can be found through the T3 Alliance website if you want to poke me with some questions at some time or other. But I say the biggest part is, there’s a lot of bureaucratic things out there in education that make it so that you feel like, “Oh, I’m just going to survive on the edge and just do what I can in isolation.”

[00:39:18]
Adam Low: And I was like that for a while until somebody gave me an award and then all of a sudden I got people asking, “Hey, how did you do that?” and running under the radar and trying to do things in your own private Idaho is not as—just tell people, “Hey, this is what I’m intending to do, I want to get partners in there and do cool things.” And the best bit is that once you get those minds in a room, good things happen. They just do.

[00:39:41]
Ben Newsome: Adam, it’s so good having a bit of a chat with you at the end of this week. I’m really inspired and I need to—I don’t know, I have to have a tea or something to calm down because I’m thinking about all the different ways that this can sort of go. Again, I love that the students are contacting the research organisations.

[00:40:05]
Ben Newsome: I love that they’re writing their mini-grants. I love that this is a multi-year process to get kids empowered to be audacious and actually think, “You know what, I can be a leader in my community. I don’t care. I’m going to do it.” That to me is a good thing because we need that. These kids have a brain, they’ve got hands, they’ve got the ability to make stuff and effect change, they just need to know they can. And that’s what T3 is doing.

[00:40:27]
Adam Low: Permission slips.

[00:40:29]
Ben Newsome: Permission slips, that’s it. Maybe we should call this episode “Permission Slips: How Do You Do It?”. But it’s very, very powerful and I know that the work that you’re doing in Alaska is profound and certainly I’m very curious to see what happens next.

[00:40:44]
Adam Low: All right, well, I look forward to anytime you want to chat. I’m happy to chat with you. You’re so…

[00:40:51]
Ben Newsome: Ah, thank you very much, Adam. Have a fantastic day.

[00:40:54]
Adam Low: All right, thank you. Appreciate it.

[00:40:56]
Ben Newsome: We hope you’ve been enjoying the Fizzics Ed Podcast! We love making science make sense. Why don’t you book us for a science show or workshop in your school? If you’re outside of Australia, you can connect with us via a virtual excursion. See our website for more!

[00:41:16]
Ben Newsome: How about that? Speaking with Adam Low is so inspiring! Trust me, in the room when he speaks, everyone genuinely listens. He is so passionate about what he does and trust me, the kids really get behind his vision and more importantly, they actually get their own vision, they actually want to make things happen themselves for their own community and they know how to make it happen through STEM.

[00:41:45]
Ben Newsome: So, if you want to find out more information, go onto the t3alliance.org website. You can find about the programme, about various events, there are courses, there’s all this stuff out there that can get you involved in making STEM happen. And I love the idea of getting again students into doing mini-grants. Literally getting properly funded to do real stuff. How great is that?

[00:42:08]
Ben Newsome: So, that is enough of this particular podcast. I hope you’ve had a bit of fun listening into this and I hope you’ve taken a few ideas down about how you can potentially get involved or at the very least emulate what is going on. Students will love it. You’ve been listening to me, Ben Newsome from Fizzics Education. This is the Fizzics Ed Podcast and I hope to catch you another time.

[00:42:36]
Ben Newsome: You’ve been listening to another Fizzics Ed Podcast. We’re excited about science! Subscribe to us on iTunes for download the next episode as soon as it’s released. And don’t forget, for hundreds of ideas, free experiments, our new “Be Amazing” book and more, go to fizzicseducation.com.au. That’s physics spelled F-I-Z-Z-I-C-S.

[00:42:44]
Ben Newsome: This podcast is part of the Australian Educators Online Network. AEON.net.au.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the T3 Alliance?

T3 stands for "Teaching Through Technology". It is a programme designed to help students engage with their communities by using STEM tools—such as drones, Raspberry Pi computers, and sensors—to solve real-world problems. It focuses on a growth mindset, design thinking, and social-emotional safety to empower students from all backgrounds.

How do student-led mini-grants work?

As part of the T3 Alliance, students are encouraged to identify a local problem and propose a solution. They then write a mini-grant (often ranging from $100 to $300) to fund the materials needed for their project. This process teaches them about administrative deliverables, accountability, and the power of their own ideas.

Why is administrative buy-in essential for these programmes?

Place-based learning can be "messy"; it involves field trips, community interviews, and non-traditional classroom schedules. Without the support of school administrators, renegade teachers often struggle to maintain these programmes. Buy-in ensures the teacher has the freedom to facilitate real-world projects that meet curriculum objectives in innovative ways.

What role do researchers and industry partners play?

Rather than just giving a one-off presentation, researchers and industry professionals are encouraged to share the actual "itch they can’t scratch"—the complex problems they are currently facing. Students then work alongside them, often via Zoom or site visits, to help ideate and build potential solutions, creating a bridge between industry and the classroom.

How does this approach benefit underserved communities?

Programmes like Upward Bound focus on first-generation, low-income students. By providing them with high-value skills and the authority to contact researchers or lead community projects, the programme builds immense self-worth. This confidence shift helps students transition from seeing themselves as outsiders to becoming leaders and college-ready scholars.

Extra thought ideas to consider

The Transition from "Sage on the Stage" to "Matchmaker"

A key takeaway from Adam’s experience is the evolution of the teacher’s role. Instead of being the sole source of knowledge, the educator becomes a matchmaker who connects students with community problems and industry experts. This requires a willingness to let the classroom look messy and unpredictable while focusing on the students’ emotional safety and sense of achievement.

The Power of "Permission Slips"

Many students have the brainpower and the drive to effect change but lack the confidence to act. Adam describes the T3 Alliance as providing "permission slips" for students to be audacious. When an educator tells a student it is okay to pick up the phone and call a university researcher, they are granting that student permission to step into a leadership role they might never have considered otherwise.

Discussion points summarised from the FizzicsEd Podcast, verified and edited by Ben Newsome CF