EAST gets underway at convention center
The Hot Springs Convention Center is overflowing with students and educators from nearly 240 school districts across the country this week for the 19th annual Environmental and Spatial Technology, or EAST, Conference.
“EAST is an educational program that was born here in Arkansas 22 years ago that stresses educational achievement through service and technology,” Mike Dozier, president and CEO for the EAST Initiative, said Tuesday. “Students take on service projects using the most sophisticated technologies we can get our hands on, many times in emerging fields.
“And a long, long time ago we realized that the best form of educational accountability was to bring (students) together. Not to give them a test that everybody can guess ‘C’ and pass. And so we started a conference 19 years ago and it is the pre-eminent student gathering in the nation, in my opinion, because they’ve got the neatest stuff and it really is student-focused.”
The conference includes an exhibit hall, where EAST schools set up booths to display the projects they have worked on during the year, as well as breakout sessions for students to attend and get hands-on experience or hear nationally recognized speakers.
“It’s not the teachers talking
about what to do while the kids are sitting in the back — the kids are leading this,” Dozier said. “The kids are even leading the logistics of the event.”
Dozier said the conference is one part exhibition, one part celebration, and one part education.
“This year we have some really high-profile presenters coming in,” he said. “One is a (virtual reality) company, one worked for Pixar on a small, little project called ‘Frozen,’ but he had to let it go. We have a TED Talker, and Skip Rutherford is coming to present. But also there are some hands-on sessions where students are learning the direct technology from experts in the field.”
The celebration aspect, he said, began Tuesday with an opening session and continues today with an awards gala where organizers and sponsors will recognize the best work at the conference.
“We will be unveiling the work we’ve been doing, including our brand-new logo” at Tuesday’s opening ceremony, he said. “We also have a featured alumnus who is actually a hometown kid, Jessica deLinde Dyckman, and she’s a graduate of Fountain Lake High School and UALR. She spent the last 10 years as a civilian liaison officer for the Marine Corps unit stationed in Marine Corps Air Station Marimar in San Diego as one of the youngest civilian liaisons in Marine Corps history.”
What’s exciting, Dozier said, is the projects the students are capable of completing and the organizations and businesses coming to participate in the event, including NWA3D, CyberPatriot, AT&T, Mid-America Science Museum, Smithsonian’s Museum on Main Street group, and NASA.
“(Students) have been excited for weeks,” Dozier said. “They plan this almost as much as we do, I think, especially when they get back from Christmas break. That’s when they really get focused on coming to do this. You’ll see a lot of amazing originality and creativity that goes into theming their booths. Kids put them together and think these through.”
During the course of the conference, Dozier said students have the opportunity to see what their peers have been working on, whether similar projects or ones they may not have realized were possible.
“(The conference) really does build on itself because every year we see stuff we had no idea was even possible,” he said. And sponsors and guests are taking notice, he said. “We have the support of a number of organizations from the Department of Education all the way to small startups, to multinationals,” Dozier said. “They make it possible for us to host an event of this size and scope. We started this thing under the running philosophy that we did not want to make it what kids expect. They’re not herded somewhere so someone can tell them what they can do one of these days. Instead, they’re leading. We want to show them what the real world looks like, and if you go to one of these big conferences you see parts of that.
“The funny thing is last year when the Facebook people left, we were debriefing with them … and they had so many more questions on how we pull this event off when it’s basically run by kids. We pull it off by telling (students) they can pull it off and then turning them loose. We tell them to bring their best.”