The STAR Discovery Bus -- Open today for visitors (Click photo to enlarge.)
Some of the farm animals directly across from the STAR Discovery Bus (Click photo to enlarge.)
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What do the STAR Discovery Bus and children with farm animals have in common?
Much more than both being at Rathdrum Days!
Read on.
My post on July 12, 2011, introduced readers to the STAR Discovery Bus 2011 Tour. Today, July 16, was the first stop on that tour, and it was at the Rathdrum Days booths at Lakeland High School.
The STAR Discovery Bus is an outreach of Discover Technology and the STAR Science Center, the brainchild of Drs. Lorna and Paul Finman intended to stimulate young students’ interests in mathematics, molecular biology, robotics, and agricultural research.
Here are just a few photos from inside the Bus.
One of the Bus's robotic workstations where future scientists could use the laptop computers to send various commands to the desktop robot. (Click photo to enlarge it.)
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Inside the Bus the visitors saw desktop robot teaching aids which the visitors could command using the laptop computers.
Some of the future scientists learning and having fun at the workstations today. (Click to enlarge the photo.)
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This photo shows some of our future scientists doing hands-on learning today.
Words of wisdom for the younger scientists and mathematicians to consider. (Click to enlarge.)
Having grown up in Palouse and graduated from Moo U in Pullman, I am thrilled that the Finmans are staying true to the agricultural heritage of this region and showing the next generation the connection between science, technology, and ag research. It was appropriately coincidental (or really great event planning) that someone put the Rathdrum Days petting pen near and just across from the Bus.
But what do robotics, mathematics, and science have to do with agriculture? Of course, the answer is “More than most people think.” Technology has been a part of agriculture for years, but as our country has changed from agrarian to industrial, only those involved in agriculture or agribusiness have fully understood the important connection of technology and agriculture.
Today in agriculture, technology is used “on the ground” for crop planning, resource maximization and waste/overlap minimization, animal growth tracking, machine steering and adjustment, and more. The term most often associated with this today is “precision agriculture.” For a pretty good non-technical introduction to how technology is used to create precision agriculture, follow the link to this article titled Things to Know About Applying Precision Agriculture in Arizona.
This article titled Precision Agriculture appeared in the February 2011 issue of Spudman. This line from the article broadly gets to the essence of technology applications in precision agriculture:
Precision agriculture can loosely be defined as using new technologies such as GPS, sensors, variable rate application equipment and aerial or satellite images to make farming easier and more profitable.
Just as precision agriculture technology will be designed by engineers, physicists, agricultural scientists, and other scientific disciplines, so will it need skilled tradesmen such as machinists to build the parts, welders and mechanics to assemble them, and technicians to keep them working at peak efficiency. And it will need the feedback from the end users, the farmers and ranchers, to identify helpful improvements and future designs.
So the technology careers relating to precision agriculture will not be limited to those wearing the white lab coats. The evolution of technology will create careers and jobs for generations to come. And in every generation, that evolution will start and continue with kids whose interest was most likely piqued and tweaked early in their lives by participating in programs like those to be developed at the STAR Science Center in Rathdrum, Idaho.