As the Chair of the Humanities Department at Ransom Everglades, I may seem like a strange choice to author a story in a magazine spread highlighting the school’s excellence in STEM – science, technology, math and engineering. I am excited to do so because it illustrates a core belief that has driven me and other faculty across all disciplines at Ransom Everglades. Equipping students to solve the most challenging problems in the world today means requiring that they let loose their creativity, work collaboratively and seek novel, multi-faceted approaches that may require stepping outside of those realms in which they are comfortable. At Ransom Everglades, “problem solving” does not mean memorizing mathematical formulas or dates in history, or filling in bubbles on a Scantron form.
It means thinking bigger and broader. It means crossing disciplines. It means tackling problems whose answers aren’t listed in some answer key in the back of the textbook. It means you can’t be just a specialist in economics, or just a mathematician, or just a writer. The challenges facing our students when they go out in the world today will require dramatic creativity, intellectual fluidity and the resilience to keep trying when they fail.
Those are skills naturally nurtured in the annual business plan challenge that has been a core part of my AP Macroeconomics/Microeconomics course for more than a decade. Entrepreneurship is the quintessential interdisciplinary experience: It is the place where science collides with the social sciences, math, language skills and the arts. Students identify real problems, test hypotheses, conduct extensive research, develop evidence-based solutions and distill and communicate the essential elements of their plan through an engaging narrative and visuals.
Many of our students’ best business plan entries are anchored in STEM fields. The top two entrepreneurial efforts in the 2019 competition featured extensive engineering. They were new products our students conceived of and mapped out for creation on a 3D printer, with plenty of guidance from our robotics coach and engineering faculty member Bob DuBard. Luisa, Makenzie and Khushi wanted to help people who struggle with essential tremors, a condition that makes executing tasks like eating soup challenging and even embarrassing. The girls reviewed spoons on the market that professed to assist with this problem, and then designed what we all agree is a better one called SpoonAble.
Holly Steinberg ’19 and Nicole Bremer ’19 created a reusable, removable laptop camera cover (CamBlok!) designed to protect users against cyber-mischief. Nicole, who had taken an engineering class under Mr. DuBard, constructed the thin, colorful, plastic laptop camera cover that could slide in and out of place, and the two worked together to refine the design. CamBlock! won second place in both the Teen Track of the 2019 Miami Herald Startup Pitch Competition and the Innovate SFL competition for private schools. It is always thrilling to watch students grow and flourish throughout the process of developing, implementing and presenting their business plans.
I look forward to the unveiling of the dedicated lab spaces and upgraded facilities that our new STEM Center will offer. As you may imagine, I don’t look at the STEM Center as a science building as much as an interdisciplinary opportunity center that will benefit all of our students.
Jen Nero
Chair of the Humanities Department