An agriscience educator is using his connections as a retired military veteran to help students prepare for careers differently.
Bob Richards has been working for the past two decades as a high school educator following a career with the Michigan Army National Guard.
“It’s not always what you know,” he shares. “It’s who you know and how you can help them and how they can help you in building those connections between disciplines, between the age groups, between generations, that opens doors for you in the future.”
Four years ago, Richards helped reestablish the Stockbridge FFA Chapter in central Michigan where he was once a student.
Middle school students are introduced to agricultural technology and robotics in agriscience classes.
“Here they get to design their own projects, follow their passion if they’re so interested, and actually do the task rather than reading about it,” he says.
Richards tells Brownfield a Specials Project Lab puts high school students in charge of solving agricultural and environmental challenges.
“The target we have right now, coral, is of interest to the students and preserving that, but the skills are transferable back here to Michigan in not only the field of agronomy and geographic information systems, but also the spectrometer could be used in a lab setting to monitor the blood of animals,” he says.
Students are traveling to the Dominican Republic next week to install their redesigned NASA STELLA (Science and Technology Education for Land/Life Assessment) sensors to monitor coral health and conduct restoration research with the Marine Innovation Center. The group will also be training students at the Punta Cana International School on how to build sensors for future research.
Previous student-led projects include helping to build CubeSat satellites to monitor algal blooms in Lake Erie, underwater cameras and water quality monitoring systems to evaluate sea lamprey in the Great Lakes, and other robotic farm technology.
Richard’s also teaches computer science and robotics at the high school.
