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Cody Musial and Molly Campbell are two students of different ages in different school districts, but both share one thing: their fathers are engineers.

Musial, 14, a freshman at Oxford High School, is interested in rockets and wants to be an aerospace engineer. Campbell, 11, a sixth-grader at Huron Valleys Muir Middle School, enjoys mathematics and is interested in robotics.

On Tuesday the two joined others at the Oakland Schools main campus in Waterford Township for the unveiling of the new STEMi Mobile Innovation Station, a 1,000-square-foot lab on wheels where K-12 students learn STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) through autonomous vehicles, robotics, extended reality and smart manufacturing.

The lab will visit all 28 county school districts this school year, or one district per week.

Wanda Cook-Robinson, superintendent of Oakland Schools, said the idea began three years ago when she and others pondered how to bridge the gap between the trades, careers and higher education.

It resulted in a K-12 curriculum that includes career readiness, exploration and placement. As Cook-Robinson put it, schools are preparing children as young as kindergarteners to think about careers that may not yet exist.

You cant wait until youre an 11th grader to think about what you want to do, she said. You have to start thinking early. And the thing about a semi-classroom (like the lab), it lets a fourth grader know what excites them and what doesnt.

Megan Schrauben, executive director of the MiSTEM Network through the state Department of Labor and Opportunity, said there is an acute shortage of jobs in information technology, healthcare, computer science and engineering.

She said most students develop career interests earlier in life either through inspiration from parents or others whom they interact with.

When you expose them to a lot of technologies, they may be our trainers of the next workforce, Schrauben said.

The mobile unit cost over $1 million. It involved dozens of partners, collaborators, donations and grants, said John Landis, Oakland Schools Education Foundation president.

Landis said the modern iteration of STEM actually started many years ago, when those who did not necessarily want to attend traditional four-year colleges and universities learned how to make things in shop class.

We have to figure out how to get the kids out there to show whats a cool job, Landis said. Show them, do you want to work for money? Whats your reason to work? And its an evolutionary process to get young people to understand what it is, and what it takes to get there. Do you need a four-year degree today? The answer is no. You can get a technical degree that is just as important.

Jarrad Grandy, executive director of student services for Oakland Schools, said part of his role involves finding the best fit for each individual.

First, weve got to change the conversation: careers are for every kid, Grandy said.

At the end, you want to have a meaningful career and it really comes down to finding the answer to three things: what are you good at, what do you like to do, and is someone willing to pay you to do it? If you can find something that connects to all three of those questions, now you have a career.

Schrauben said current societal trends can be traced with the evolution of technology, when the first computers took up whole buildings. Today, nearly everyone carries a computer in their pocket.

But mobile STEM units are still not as common as she or the state would like them to be.

Its part of the reason why the iSTEM council was formed in the first place, to build relationships with the business and school communities and to also recognize that because of the constant changing nature (of technology), its much easier to update a mobile lab like this than to rebuild and have a school go to a bond or something like that in order to keep their technologies current in their own buildings, she said.

Cook-Robinson said kids used to dream about being firefighters or police officers. Now, they are dreaming of building autonomous machinery or the next big invention.

Its teaching what can be, she said.

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The next-generation workforce: A new county mobile STEM unit is coming to every school district - The Oakland Press