With the rate at which technology is getting injected into everything, if we don't take basic STEM education seriously, we are going to have serious problems in the future. Let me explain ... #Thread
2 months ago, I bought a new car. Nothing fancy, 2014 Toyota Camry. I wanted one with all options, including push-to-start. When I told my mechanic this, he advised me against it and said "the push to start thing, when it spoils, they find it very difficult to fix"
I thought he was just being someway. I took his advice because finding a good mechanic in Ghana is not an easy task. But I didn't think much about it. Fastforward to a few weeks later. A friend of mine who drives a Honda Civic tells me his car has been at the shop for a while.
I asked him why. And he said, the car was push to start. And he lost the main key. He had a spare key but it didn't work. So they've been trying to figure out how to fix it and now he's looking at buying a new ignition system.
My first thought was "what kind of nonsense is this?" Why would they give you a spare key that doesn't work? Let's check online. So we check online and there were actually instructions on how to reprogram/reset a spare key to act as the main key if you lose the main key.
He went to the shop, followed the instructions and his car started. His mechanics were all staring at him and said this is "white man magic"
Now heres' the problem. As of 2018, almost every car comes with a bunch of tech features that are supposed to make the car safer to drive. From sensors to almost everything being electronic, technology is being applied in ways that we had never thought about 10 years ago.
When you think about a mechanic, they are typically primary or JHS dropouts who understudy a master and learn how to fix cars. This has worked because the basic mechanical structure of a car has not changed in the last 50 years.
It got to a point where some mechanics specialized only in some type of cars. Mercedes, BMW, etc ... because those cars were already introducing some technology you wouldn't find in other cars.
Reality Check: All the features you see in Mercedes and BMW today have become standard in Toyota and Hyundai.
And new brands are building cars with entirely different structures and a loooooot of software. E.g. Tesla.
What that means is if you buy a car in the next 5 years or so, you won't just need a mechanic. You'll need someone who understands the technology being used in future cars and can troubleshoot and fix them like an engineer would.
If the trend of mechanics dropping out after primary or JHS continues, it would make sense to introduce basic STEM concepts in primary and JHS. Teach kids how to code. They learn to think logically and solve problems using proven methods.
Even if they dropout at some point to pursue non informal professions, that way of thinking would serve them well.
2nd scenario: I have a bunch of smart lights all over in my house. They are setup in the living room, the bedroom the home office and the porch. One day I call my electrician because some of the light bulbs outdoors weren't working.
I wasn't home when he came over to work on the light. But the smart light on the porch is Yellow. So he told my wife he was done and she came to try out all the lights and noticed the porch light was white. So she asked him if he changed that light too.
He said "yes madam. that light wasn't working well. When i switch it on, it was delaying before coming on, I don't know why. and then it goes off on it's own even though the switch is on"
My wife screamed and said "herh, do you know how much that bulb is? that's a smart light, bring it back". My brothers and sisters, electrician threw away a 50 USD light bulb because he didn't know what it was.
Thankfully it didn't break or anything. So she made him fix it back and explained to him what it was and how it worked. He was confused. He was trying to wrap his head around how the wiring of the whole thing works.
Being an electrician who works with cables and wires, the concept of wirelessly turning an light on and off didn't make sense to him.
When I came home and she told me what happened, it made me think. Smart lights are expensive today because they are not cheap to produce but year after year, they will get cheaper and pretty much become the standard.
In order to set them up, you need to have a WiFi router that the smart lights bridge can talk to. So if you are not an electrician with basic knowledge of networking, you can't do it.
In the future, when you call yourself a mechanic, an electrician, a plumber, etc ... if you don't know how to work with some technologies, you won't be able to survive. Because specialists would have to be called in to do these basic things that could have been thought in primary
The people who drive Rolls Royce in Ghana don't take their cars to mechanics. They send it to Mechanical Lloyd. The only auto shop in Ghana that has trained mechanical engineers who go abroad for training on how to fix and maintain them.
If we don't take STEM training at basic level seriously, thats' what will happen with everything. Want to fix your car? You need a mechanic + IT guy to fix it. Want to fix your lights? Electrician + Networking guy.
It doesn't have to be that way. I hope the government sees the value in introducing subjects like basic programming, networking, logic based thinking, etc ... at lower levels. It will go a long way. Otherwise we'll be stuck in the past. #TheEnd
