TechJOYnT Academy takes part in Governor Mary Fallin’s STEM Summit on October 7th 2014.
Oklahoma City, OK (PRWEB) October 17, 2014 -- STEM Education is still a major untapped resource today: in 2014, 9.5% of the jobs are STEM occupations and by 2024 Oklahoma is forecast to have 188,619 STEM related jobs, a growth of approximately 19% in ten years.Those numbers show that STEM is very important for the future of Oklahoma’s growing economy.
The problem is that there isn’t enough students working towards STEM related careers. Indeed in 2014, there were only 2,968 STEM graduates with an Associate degree or higher but there were 6,433 STEM positions offered in Oklahoma. This Skills gap needs to be closed if the United States wants to stay competitive as a nation on the global market. That is why Governor Mary Fallin started an initiative with other state governors across the nation to align workforce needs and educational levels. Governor Mary Fallin created the STEM Summit to educate teachers and students about the importance of STEM education. STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Maths. It is all the areas that enable students to get higher paying jobs, in aerospace industry or in the energy sector for example.
Kids don’t take enough STEM courses such as Maths, Physics or Chemistry to be able to be successful in their college education."many students never make it into the STEM pipeline because of inadequate preparation in math and science….” Redmond-Sanogo et al., 2014.
96% of STEM jobs require post secondary education, and 70% require a Bachelor’s degree or higher. However students need to take those classes during middle school and high school if they want to be prepared for college, and this is not happening right now.
Students don’t know that in STEM courses they can develop robots, create applications for phones, design video games; all those things that kids enjoy doing. If they knew that they could do those things while being in class, and that those areas can be valuable for their future, there would be more interest in STEM.
On October 7th 2014, the second edition of the Oklahoma STEM Summit took place, and TechJOYnT Academy was one of the guests in this forum.
TechJOYnT Academy CEO Ray Shaik really appreciates the governor Mary Fallin’s initiative to create this summit: he said "we heavily support this message and we believe STEM education is a key to success for Oklahoma.”
K-12 state department Education, the career Tech panel, and STEM communities all agree that STEM education needs to be introduced early on in schools, principally in middle schools and high schools. Another common theme of the Summit is that there is a need for hands on labs to teach students in an interactive environment. TechJOYnT provides these hands on labs, they offer workshops in game design, app development, robotics and electronics either at school, after school or with field trips to TechJOYnT Academy. TechJOYnT is preparing Oklahoma students for the future workforce by teaching them practical skills as CEO Ray Shaik said "to connect theory and practice and gain a higher level of motivation and interest in technical career paths.”
TechJOYnT offers families, students, and mentors the opportunity to learn engineering and entrepreneurship concepts through hands-on robotics and game design projects. For more information, follow techJOYnT onFacebook and Twitter.
Sharii McNew, Techjoynt, http://www.techjoynt.com, +1 (405) 345-5010, [email protected]
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