Dow Chemical Awards $30,000 Grant to Bristol Township School District

If you are going to award a substantial grant to the Bristol Township School District's middle school science, technology, engineering and math program, there's no better way to do it than wheeling out a six-foot robot to help with the presentation.

Dow Chemical's H.H. Dowbot rolled into the technology classroom at Franklin D. Roosevelt Middle School Friday morning to the majestic sound of the Star Wars theme, handing out high-fives and giving the young students a taste of what they can create with some technology education.

The wise-cracking robot's appearance was in celebration of the company's recent $30,000 grant awarded to the school district's Gateway to Technology program offered at the middle schools.

"This is a great opportunity to build confidence around STEM education," said Brian Albright, director of Dow Chemical's Bristol site. "This is a neat skill set to have, and anything we can do to spark that interest, we want to do."

The call to attract more students in the STEM fields is getting louder as more than 600,000 U.S. jobs currently sit unfilled because of the lack of qualified candidates, according to estimates from the President's Council of advisors on Science and Technology.

Bristol Township School District's Gateway to Technology program is designed to build an early interest in the field and prepare the students that choose to continue following the career path into high school and beyond.

"Every middle school student goes through the STEM program," said Roosevelt Principal Kevin Boles. "The seventh graders take Design and Modeling, which is basically learning about heavy measuring techniques. Eighth grade is when they get into building robots."

The idea of building a robot sounds exciting on the surface, but the class is not simply about opening a kit, assembling pieces and watching them go. There is a complicated, precise and labor-intensive process that goes into constructing the machines.

"The programming is the most pain-staking part of the project," said Yolande Jone-Armstrong, a teacher at FDR. "They split into teams and work together to get the software right. If you want it to go left, you create the program and test it, then try to figure out what you did wrong."

The $30,000 grant will go a long way to upgrading the computers and software for the program, said Boles. Dow Chemical created a Community Advisory Committee in each of the communities where it has a site to find the best places to award annual grants. Girls, Inc. of Delaware, located in Newark, Del., and the North Penn Valley Boys and Girls Club in Montgomery County also received $30,000 grants this year.

"The grant will strengthen the pipeline from our middle school STEM program to our highly successful pre-engineering program at Harry S Truman High School," said Dr. Samuel Lee, superintendent of the Bristol Township School District.