Tom Vander Ark

Town Hall: Robotics

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Key Points

  • Robotics education is crucial for preparing students for future job markets by developing essential skills and fostering innovation.

  • Collaborative partnerships and strategic planning are key to successfully integrating robotics into educational systems and community development.

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In our latest Town Hall, Tom Vander Ark leads a conversation on the transformative role of robotics in K-12 education and its implications for the future workforce. We explore how robotics serves as a catalyst for skill development and personal growth, highlighting insights from experts like Ritch Ramey, Axel Reitzig, and Adam Kulaas, and discussing the importance of developing 21st-century skills such as problem-solving and collaboration.

The event dives deep into the intersection of education and workforce readiness, introducing Getting Smart’s insights on learning environments: traditional classroom settings, integrated STEM programs, and the expansive opportunities provided by robotics education. This shift underscores the importance of engaging young people in real-world learning experiences. Axel Reitzig from St. Vrain Valley shares insights into how district-wide robotics programs can nurture innovation and agency, emphasizing the need for comprehensive and authentic learning pathways. The discussion also highlights the role of partnerships in advancing robotics education, with districts like Tacoma Public Schools pioneering community-based initiatives and facilities.

In the final segment, we explore the “superpowers” necessary for thriving in a rapidly changing work environment, such as adaptability and technical skills. The podcast underscores the dual nature of robotics as both a platform for empowerment and a space for innovation, urging listeners to foster a connected approach to learning. As we call for schools and districts with exemplary robotics programs to share their practices, the conversation closes with a call to action for educators, policymakers, and communities to prioritize robotics education as a key component of preparing students for future challenges and opportunities.

Outline

Introduction to Physical AI and Robotics

Tom Vander Ark: We’re going to talk about robotics, but more broadly, this idea of physical AI. We’ve just stepped into a new age of automation, one driven by multiple forms of AI, including generative AI. By the end of the decade, we’ll see the physical manifestation of automation, and in many cases, that’s going to be in the form of robotics. Specifically, robotics is probably going to quadruple in size from maybe a $70 billion segment to a $200 or $300 billion segment by 2030. Broadly speaking, automation and robotics are going to transform many sectors of employment.

Today, we want to discuss the implications for K-12 pathways. Specifically, how and where should we be introducing mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, and computational thinking? More broadly, I want to talk about how robotics can really contribute to powerful learning experiences. We’re going to do that with our friends from St. Vrain Valley and Tacoma Public Schools, where we have seen powerful learning take place, with young people working collaboratively and creatively to solve problems in complex environments. Part of the reason we’re gathering today is the inspiration we’ve seen in Tacoma and elsewhere, for the powerful experiences that can introduce kids to their future. We’re going to start with our friend Ritch Ramey. I met Ritch probably 11 or 12 years ago when he was helping to stand up RAMTEC, which quickly became the best robotics training program in America. It was unique because it was at a career center, Tri-Rivers Career Center in Ohio, and it was for high school students, college students, and working adults. Ritch introduced me to the first three young men who had been Fanuc and Motoman certified. That program ended up scaling across the state of Ohio, and Ritch really gave me my modern introduction to robotics and robotics education.

Tom Vander Ark: Ritch will give us an overview of where the market is headed and what’s happening in robotics education. Then we’re going to talk to Axel Reitzig from St. Vrain, probably the biggest and best robotics education district in America with a lot of award-winning teams. They just had another national champion at FIRST Robotics two weeks ago, and Axel has been the driving force behind that. Then we’ll hear from our friend Adam Kulaas in Tacoma Public Schools, which is also doing really cool things at a number of sites. Adam and his team are planning a brand-new facility right in the heart of Tacoma. We’ve got a great outline ahead. Comments, chats, and suggestions are welcome. Ritch, I’ll let you kick things off. Give us an overview of what’s going on in robotics and robotics education.

Ritch Ramey: Well, I appreciate it, Tom. I just want to thank Mason and Tom and Getting Smart for allowing me to be a part of this great program today. I’m very proud to kick off this program as a representative. As Tom was saying, I met him a few years ago, and he toured RAMTEC and graciously put our facility on the map by including us in his book at the time as one of the leading facilities for training in robotics and automation in the United States. From that standpoint, we were able to build 23 career centers, spending about $24 million in funding to build centers that were doing K-12 training for robotics and automation. We’ve been doing a lot of great things that we were doing at the time, like VEX, FIRST, and Legos, and Makey Makeys, and all kinds of things to get students inspired to go into this great field. Now, with my job at the Association for Advancing Automation, I’m a director of education, and A3 has more than 1,350 members worldwide. It’s the largest professional organization in the world that promotes robotics, automation, machine vision, AI, and advanced manufacturing. Our association has thousands and thousands of members. If you look inside these 1,350 companies and institutions, leading ones in the world like NVIDIA, Fanuc, Motoman, General Motors, General Electric, and Boeing, they’re all members. Anyone involved in automation sees a need from our organization to promote robotics and automation, but also on the safety side of it, to make a safer workplace and to upscale their many members. Our next upcoming thing we’re doing, Automate, you know, the sales come out of that as well.

Our next big focus will be Automate in Detroit in May. It’s North America’s largest trade show, and we’ll have thousands and thousands of people come through, but the entire convention center is sold out. So, if you’re interested in robotics, it’s the place to be. You know, robots are picking up Corvettes, but even the latest mobile robotics, humanoid robotics, all those will be there. We have a few other major events coming up that will be interesting for some of you potentially, such as our Focus Intelligent Vision and AI Conference in Seattle in September. Just two years ago, we were told by our organization members that humanoid robots aren’t a thing for manufacturing. Then we had our first humanoid robot forum last fall in Memphis, and we’re having another one in Seattle. I just saw today where one of the leading investment corporations said that they expect $25 trillion in humanoid robot sales by 2050, which is a huge amount of money ahead.

Tom Vander Ark: It’s not just Elon that’s excited about humanoid robots, right? There’s a real deal here.

Ritch Ramey: A lot of major companies now are robot companies. Of course, the humanoid human is not the ideal working mechanism in a factory. Humanoids may sound great for some of the things we do, but there are some really great processes out there that I don’t know if the humanoid robot can take over. But hey, we don’t know; that’s 25 years away. With AI, who knows what the world will be like then? Our International Robot Safety Conference is one of our major ones as well. We’re the leaders, subject matter experts in manufacturing and AI. We’ve developed safety courses and are the boilerplate for safety for robotics and mobile robotics. We’ve run grants with the Department of Labor, and we’re one of the major suppliers of statistics in the country for anything robots. If you’re interested, we have a statistic for you, so you can go on our website and find out. If not, you can email me, and I’ll hunt them down for you.

Challenges and Opportunities in Robotics

Ritch Ramey: Our 1,350 members get together annually, and we ask them what’s upcoming, what trends or concerns they have right now about robotics. From year to year, we’ve heard forever that robots take jobs. If you look at the red line on here, the red line is the unemployment rate. The blue bars are the sales in robotics. If you look at sales, as unemployment went up, sales went down, and as sales went up, unemployment went down. It’s really the inverse of what you hear a lot about, and we’ve got the data to prove it. One of the things I can’t say enough about is if a company doesn’t automate, they will perish. They need to automate to stay current, to keep the existing workforce working. With a huge shortage of workers today, what you end up doing is reskilling your workforce. If there’s a task that a robot takes over, they’ve got a spot for that worker somewhere else because there’s a huge shortage.

Tom Vander Ark: Ritch, I’ll note that what’s going to be different about the next 10 years is that we’re going to overlay digital automation on top of physical automation. That may change this curve, so we want to keep an eye out for that. But your point is an important one that historically, physical automation hasn’t led to massive unemployment, but just noting that we’re in brave new territory. We have layers of automation coming right at us.

Ritch Ramey: We have a shortage of workers. We’re looking at about a million that we’re short right now. We’ve got to fill those voids somewhere in that workforce. Automation seems to be able to do that for us.

The North American sales trend line since 2010 has seen growth up or down a little bit every year, but if you look at the curve of sales in robots, it’s going up every year. One of the things we don’t talk about enough is robot density. That’s the number of robots per 10,000 workers. The United States is 10th in the world in robot density. Number one is China. China and South Korea both have a huge emphasis on automation. You think of the largest countries in the world, and the largest country in the world wants to automate with the workforce they have. They see the need for automation, not only for the workforce but because robots are so much more accurate in what they’re able to do and accomplish. No restroom breaks, and they’re able to do things more accurately and precisely for the most part, which is what we hear from most of our industry people. When it comes to quality control, safety, and the dark, dirty, dangerous jobs, obviously, we don’t want humans doing those. There’s an ideal place for a robot to go through. This one here shows the difference between automation in the auto industry and non-auto industry. As you can see, the auto industry led the way for a long time. But right now, we’re seeing a big increase in robotics in ag, food, and warehousing industries, as well as the service industry. We’re seeing a big increase in robotics right now, and mobile robotics are really taking off. You see it at Amazon and different companies out there. They’re expecting to have 5 million mobile robots sold within five years, which is a huge upswing in mobile robotics.

When we asked our 1,350 members plus, “What’s your biggest challenge right now?” inflation, supply chains, and tariffs were the biggest concerns they had in January, and the lack of a skilled workforce the year before. It was the lack of a skilled workforce. The uncertainty is a little worrisome for some of them right now because if you think about the robots made in North America, there are really no robot companies in North America. Most of our robots are assembled here, but they’re really from foreign countries, so parts are coming in from other countries. That’s one of the big things on the supply chain. Then, of course, the lack of skilled workers, the cost of high initial investment, technological market acceptance, and regulatory challenges are always going to be a problem, but you look at the major two up there: economic uncertainty and lack of skilled workers. Then, when we look at orders, they’re going to continue to go up. We had a little bit of a slide last year, but towards the end of the year, we had an uptick in robot sales in North America, and we saw that increasing in January, February, and March. The number one for robot orders is material handling still, and welding is number two. Then, when we look at the growth, the green growth up here, look at the increase in food, life sciences, pharma, biomed, and automotive. But look at the food and consumer industry. Anything that palletizes has large orders seems to be taking off in the automation field. A lot of great things are going on in warehousing right now and in agriculture and construction.

Then the humanoids. There are a lot of companies out there with humanoid robots right now. We haven’t really seen a lot of them in the manufacturing sector being used yet, but that’s not saying that Amazon and other companies haven’t already had ideas for installing them into their organizations. We should be interested in the next 12 months in what happens with humanoid robots.

I think the last thing I have here is the mobile robot forecast. If you look at this forecast, look at 2027, 2026, and 2025. We’re looking at huge upturns in mobile robotics. Traditionally, you’d go to these old factories that had AGVs going around. If you got in the way of an AGV, automated guided vehicle, it would stop. With AMRs, they map a facility, and with LIDAR and everything they have on them, they can reroute and get where they need to go as long as they’re programmed well. Right now, with our safety standards, we’re seeing a pretty safe AMR group out there.

Tom Vander Ark: That’s a great statistic, Ritch. Remember when we met 10 years ago, almost all the robotics were fixed robotics, right? They were assembly line fixed and had limited capability. Now, 10, 12 years later, we’re talking about super capable mobile robotics. Excellent. We’ll both talk about drones and autonomous vehicles. I call the AMRs with a robot on top of them a “free-range robot” because they can come in, and I saw it five years ago. They brought in a mobile robot, mapped our big robotic facility in five minutes, and that robot would go around that facility, not hitting anything. Well, you put a robot on top of that now, and you have a type C robot with an industrial robot on it. There’s a lot that can be done with one of those. It’s almost something out of the Jetsons or Star Wars. I appreciate the time today, Tom. It’s great being able to talk to everybody. I’ve done VEX and FIRST Robotics in the past. There are 2 million students right now in the pathway between Project Lead the Way, VEX, and FIRST alone in robotics. We’re excited as an organization to help with those organizations to get those 2 million students. Hopefully, a lot of them come into our A3 members and come to work for organizations. If you’re interested, come to Automate. There’s a free educator’s day there on the 14th of May.

Tom Vander Ark: If you’re anywhere near Detroit on the 14th of May, it’d be a great place to be. Hang around if you can, Ritch, but we’ve got two great examples coming up.

Axel Reitzig on District-Wide Robotics Programs

Tom Vander Ark: Our friend Axel from St. Vrain, congrats again. You had another team win the FIRST National Championship a couple of weeks ago. Axel, why are you so excited about robotics?

Axel Reitzig: I could take up the whole hour. Most of my presentation will be about the way our district has developed a district-wide robotics program and how that is creating this workforce that we’re talking about to support all these advancements, which are really coming up in a fast and powerful way. About 13 or so years ago, our district really started doing things as a system to support robotics education. I had the chance to start doing robotics a couple of years earlier when I was asked to be a STEM education elective teacher at the middle school level. Once I was introduced to robotics, and mind you, I had no background in engineering or STEM other than maybe instructional technologies. But once I discovered robotics through participating in BEST Robotics, it was clear to me that robotics was the perfect disruptive innovation that we needed to really change education in the direction we wanted to go. All the discussion at the time was about 21st-century skills, authentic learning, student-led learning, authentic tasks, and collaboration. I can go on and on. Robotics just naturally, again, competitive robotics in this context, but really was the perfect way to do that. That’s a big part of my journey.

Tom Vander Ark: I want to underscore that comment. You view robotics not only as a pathway linked to employment opportunities but as a uniquely powerful way to create great learning experiences for kids.

Axel Reitzig: That’s very fair. I appreciate you saying that. The way my thinking has formed over these 13 years is like the idea of a funnel. We know that even if kids stay at the top of the funnel, a lot of what they learn and experience through doing some type of robotics will transfer to help them be successful later on in life. For those kids who deep dive and go down that funnel, maybe into humanoid robotics or AMRs, that gives them that competitive advantage I’m going to talk about here in a second. I want to contextualize the work we’ve done and the successes we’ve had over the last few years by talking about our district and then also about the Innovation Center and how we are doing robotics, but then also within the district overall. The theme that I hope runs through my presentation is how, to your point, Tom, robotics really advances our overall mission and our strategic priorities, both as a district and as a program.

St. Vrain Valley School District is where I’m at. We are Colorado’s seventh-largest district. We have around 33,000 students, and we’re growing. Our growth plans are to double that amount of kids in about 25 years, so that’s a lot of growth we’re projecting. We’re north of Denver, close to Boulder, so there’s sort of a Boulder-Longmont-Denver triangle, I guess you could say, that has a lot of high-tech. We are situated really well to benefit from the industries in our area doing this kind of work. We are geographically large, covering 412 square miles, which can be a challenge, but it represents a different kind of diversity. We serve around eight different municipalities, and we are comprised of two counties primarily, which are at the opposite ends of the social and political spectrum. You can imagine what kind of conversations might come out of that. Currently, we have about 60 schools and programs that we serve. Here’s our mission statement. This is something our superintendent says all the time: we want kids to graduate with a competitive advantage so they can succeed on the global stage. I want you to remember this because over the last four, five, or six years, this is what we’re seeing robotics providing our students. It’s really amazing, and robotics is so well-aligned with this particular mission. Just to let you know, here are our strategic priorities. This is how our district is pursuing or building out that vision. There are four of these that are really relevant to our robotics work: strong and visionary leadership, outstanding teachers and staff, communication and collaboration, and cutting-edge technology and innovation. At least four of these building blocks for our strategic priorities are advanced through our work in robotics.

Innovation Center and Robotics by Design

Axel Reitzig: I think that’s why our leadership has really bought into it. Now, the Innovation Center. Here’s some information about us. We are essentially a STEAM hub for St. Vrain. We serve all 33,000 students, from preschool to actually kids in grades 14 because they’re doing concurrent enrollment classes. That’s a pretty sizable mission that we’ve got. We have 10 focus areas, and they mostly focus on emerging technologies, but not all. We have artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, robotics, aviation, bioscience, video arts, entrepreneurship, digital design, and virtual reality. We’re starting up a music innovation pathway. We also have what we call PTE, which is a teaching pathway to develop that teaching workforce. That’s a great one. We created a formula that I think is very successful, going back to that idea of a funnel, to give a lot of kids a lot of exposure to explore. Through that exploration, they start to develop interests and passions that we can then provide more targeted education to. Through that, they get to understand and make career-connected career connections and think of themselves as people going into a particular career related to fields connected to robotics. They get deep experiences to make informed decisions before they graduate about what they want to do. Underwriting all that work are partnerships. That’s, in a nutshell, the Innovation Center model, and I really believe in this. I think it’s very powerful and works very well. You can see our mission statement here, and I think it’s pretty aligned to our district mission and captures that hub role that we have, not only within the district but within the community.

Here’s robotics in St. Vrain. You’ll see in our tagline “Excellence by Design.” We take that to heart. We try not to leave anything up to chance. So Robotics by Design, we early on created a leadership team and then created a document called Robotics by Design, which is linked to this document or this slide here, which mapped out our vision and a pathway to enact that vision. You can see what our goal was here. Again, we want kids to be able to compete on that global stage. Competitive robotics has been that tip of the spear, and you’ll see what I mean by that too. It’s been so fruitful for us to participate in things like VEX and FIRST Robotics. VEX Robotics is our biggest competitive program. When we started 13 years ago, we had maybe 20-ish teams across three or four schools. This year, we had 265 teams, K-12, that’s over a thousand students. That’s at almost every school in the district, so probably about 54 out of our 60 schools. We ran 20 regular season tournaments and ran all four state tournaments. That’s 24 tournaments. As a result, we have 21 teams going to Worlds over the last three or four years. That’s roughly what we’ve had ongoing.

Last year, we also had a 2024 World Champions team that won the High School Excellence Award, which is the top award for VEX. I like to think of this as a big robotics academy. Then we, of course, have FIRST Robotics and there’s a program called Up-A-Creek Robotics. You may be familiar with them. Very, very successful. This year they had one FRC team of about 70 students. They were semi-finalists at Worlds, one FTC team with 12 students, and they were world champions this year. Six LEGO League teams with about 38 students are building that base. They do summer camps as well. Not only did they win this year, but about two or three years ago, they also won two additional world championships. Just between VEX and FIRST, we’ve had four world champion teams out of St. Vrain. That’s a real point of pride for us. We also do, crazy enough, MATE Robotics, which probably sounds really crazy because we’re in the middle of Colorado. But we have been running a regional for MATE, that’s the Marine Advanced Technology Education. Oh, that’s the underwater one, correct? Yes. I’m sorry. This is underwater robotics competition.

Tom Vander Ark: Which is wonderfully ironic that in Longmont, Colorado, you’re running an underwater robotics championship.

Axel Reitzig: Yes, I think Adam, you’re on the coast, so probably this is something supernatural for you. But what we’re finding is that there are actually a lot of applications for different water municipality organizations and things like that too. We did host the World Championships two years ago, so we had 73 teams from 13 countries. That was a really great way to highlight the community.

AI and Robotics Competitions

Axel Reitzig: Here’s a tangential one, but related, especially going to the opening remarks around physical AI or embodied AI, that we are doing a lot of work around AI, and one competition our students participate in is WAICY, the World AI Competition for Youth. In the last three years, they have placed first, third, and second place. These competitions, again, are the tip of the spear. They really allow us to generate excitement and get stakeholder buy-in. Then what that lets us do is…

I should go back to this too, but what this has led us to do is really clarify our thinking on the value of robotics. Early on, there were a lot of questions from our leadership like, “Well, it looks like a fun after-school activity, but why should we continue to invest resources because it is resource-intensive?” But we came up with these pillars of robotics, and these would probably be refined if we had a chance to look at them today. But this is what we came up with to explain to our stakeholders: this is what kids get out of doing robotics. It’s not just some kind of fun activity. It’s deep, meaningful work that they’re doing. I don’t have to necessarily tell all of you what that is. Again, this goes back to that idea of competitive advantage.

The other thing too that competitive robotics has allowed us to do is to leverage that excitement and momentum to build things out more broadly, with that idea of equity in mind. Going back to our three buckets of how we build out programs, we offer a lot of exploration opportunities throughout the school year. We have summer camps for elementary through high school levels. We had over 800 kids last year do that. We have a mobile lab that goes out to do outreach to schools and beyond the district. We do elementary field trips on an ongoing basis. That’s the top of the funnel.

Expanding Robotics Education

Axel Reitzig: Education is one really neat thing that I don’t know how many people know about. Again, 13 years ago, we had maybe one or two schools offering computer science at the secondary level or even engineering. Now all of our secondary schools are offering some level of robotics and computer science. Over 13 years, enrollment of students in these programs has increased at least 500%. Those are basically the numbers I’ve got, so that’s a real value-add as well to this, our competitive robotics. We offered experiences to be on project teams and work-based learning. Our Innovation Center offers 30 active project teams. These are paid opportunities for students. They’re doing authentic work for real clients. We also offer internships and job shadows. Many of these relate to robotics-specific fields and then STEM pathways. This has really developed broadly across the district. We have the Innovation Center, our drone program, data science. Our sister program offers advanced manufacturing. We have an aerospace engineering program, a STEM academy, and four P-TECHs. All these have grown up over the last 13 years, and robotics has helped drive attention and interest in participating in them.

To wrap up, 13 years ago, here I’m looking at what robotics looked like to me. I had no idea what to do with it. I knew its potential. It was like a pile of parts, just like a new team looking at all these parts to make a robot out of. But by intentional design, by robotics through design or excellence through design, by thinking as a system, working as a system, we were able to go from that pile of parts to having a highly competitive program that really produces value for our students, for our stakeholders, for our community, and is creating those workforce pipelines that we talk about. Again, by design is kind of the big theme too. Thank you. I really appreciate Tom and Mason for the opportunity to share this work. This has been the highlight of my career, absolutely, being able to be involved with this program.

Tom Vander Ark: Axel, we had a question about mindsets and skillsets that were developed. You touched on it a few times. I want to ask you specifically about elementary. Where and how does robotics show up in the elementary grades, and what do you think the benefit is?

Axel Reitzig: I think our overall philosophy is the earlier you can start, the better. Our competitive robotics is primarily done through after-school clubs. We have some elementaries that have either a STEM instructor or a STEM special, so they’re able to be exposed to coding and robotics through that, but that’s not across all elementary schools. Our district talks a lot about foundational innovation, and what they mean by foundational is just to ensure students have all those strong foundational skills in reading, math, writing, and critical thinking. The focus really at the elementary level is to ensure kids are succeeding in those areas. They recognize that there’s a lot of value in it, so almost all of our elementary schools do these programs, but it’s not necessarily during the day.

Tom Vander Ark: Fantastic. Thanks for the overview of St. Vrain Valley School District Robotics, Adam Kulaas, Tacoma Public Schools.

Tacoma’s Robotics Initiatives

Tom Vander Ark: Adam, I was doing an interview about 90 minutes ago, and I said, “You’re probably one of the best examples of a district leader using design thinking to help a city imagine a better future.” Tell us how you’re doing that in robotics.

Adam Kulaas: As is often the case, I get to represent a lot of talented, highly committed individuals, not only in our district but in our city. I can’t talk about Tacoma without celebrating the level of partnership, and some of that will get unpacked specifically in this. Before I transition slides, this is one of my favorite pictures of all time. It happened at a trades experience in partnership with the city at our major sporting dome every fall. This year, we had some of our different robotics vendors and some of our computer science represented. I think it really encapsulates what we’re talking about today in terms of this opportunity, this “yes, and” opportunity to start to reimagine all the way down to this. It’s double fun because I actually know this kid. He’s four years old. He’s in a pre-K program. His name is Liam, and this is one of my solution partners, and this is the robotic dog that I’m saving up for that I dropped in the chat. It’s just this cool image capture of where we are from a mindset side in terms of robotics, AI, and all innovations.

Tacoma has about 30,000 students. We have 12 high schools, 35 elementary schools, 13 middle schools, and just this rich, urban, beautifully diverse learning ecosystem. I always start lately because our work is so grounded, and it’ll provide fun crossover in terms of robotics and where we’re going with that around our pathway work. We’ve been sprinting for the last couple of years in renovating and innovating what our pathway looks like, which feeds directly into this bigger picture continuum of learning P-20. Partnerships beyond the diploma and this integration. Everything filters through essentially crafting opportunities for youth, wherever they are at with this launchpad of opportunities towards the end. We’ll talk about some programming first. Sammy currently offers an ROV program. Sammy could be its own probably town hall.

That’s in our zoo, our Point Defiance Zoo. It’s our city zoo, regional zoo. We run a full custom-built robotics program there. They don’t use kits; they actually do the fab and the prototyping. The zoo conveniently borders water in terms of our marina, which is a partnership with Parks Tacoma. They actually integrate it into lots of different sustainability efforts and programs. They integrate into, we’re getting into even pylon-like, truly application-based. It’s pretty expansive in terms of where they’re going. One of the funnest environments in our entire district is in that lab, watching kids go from pencil prototype all the way to product iterations, testing, ultimately prototyping again, and making revisions. Truly, to Tom’s point, really living this design thinking cycle. We also have launched our drone training program. All students have access to an industry-recognized credential for an FAA certification beyond recreational. We have our first student who’s starting to gig. There’s this multifaceted mindset around, yes, we want to get them the credentials and turn them into practical applications, but we also want them to earn opportunities to explore other applications that are very student-centered. That program is exciting. Soda Bots started in 2008. This is just one of their team photos. I know we’re tight on time. I’m watching it. Just because I can feel Mason watching it.

Their website is extremely well built in terms of sharing all of their accolades. It’s an absolute pride point for me to talk about them with full disclosure. Even looking at their team photo, the amount of adults, whether they are educators within our system, adjunct instructors within our system, or community members and parents, it’s really this beautiful community of individuals that have been going for well over a decade now, engaging in really high-quality engagement around robotics.

These are some more photos. I love going to the events, but even when I can’t make it, just the capture of what they ultimately produce in terms of the competition side of things is pretty exciting. It started at a School of the Arts, so we have three partners, and we call them the partner schools. They’re three innovative models that Getting Smart talks quite a bit about. You can always find more information on them, but it has truly expanded across our district. I think there’s a fun part that has surfaced in some of the other presentations today around this intentionality of introduction, exploration at a much earlier age. From a priming standpoint and just helping kids understand or see what they don’t know, I think that’s one of our goals. Soda Bots is a really cool driver in being able to show actual physical evidence of what it can be to get kids excited.

Future Visions and Community Partnerships

Adam Kulaas: We’re going to shift gears into some upcoming things. The Maritime 253 Skill Center. Skill centers are a unique model to Washington State. Every state has some iteration of them, but we will be the 18th skill center in the state of Washington, officially authorized by the state. It will fully maximize our reality of having a global port in our city. The Port of Tacoma, I can literally see it out my window, is an exciting opportunity and a decade-long conversation around how can we not only promote the future of work but also enhance this opportunity to partner. This campus will house not only our skill center but our port administration’s offices. It’s this rich learning environment. Beyond the beautiful aesthetics, when you break into the behind-the-walls, it has this really fun integration, and we’re leaning a lot into advanced CTE’s kind of cluster, especially their cross-cutting opportunities. If you’re familiar with that work, if you’re in CTE land out there or you’re not, it’s worthy of a look for sure. But when you look at it and get into the digital technology side, there are these cross-cutting technologies around automation and unmanned vehicles. This skill center will host two pathways extremely relevant to robotics in terms of our mechatronics lab and our unmanned vehicles pathway, which will do land, sea, and air unmanned vehicles and robotics, all custom builds with applications. In terms of even the other pathways, there’s a state sustainability lane. Our underwater robotics are currently, like I said, engaging in multiple elements of maximizing the fact that we have water and lots of different elements of that. The skill center is a fun working, real example that will open in the fall of ’26, amplifying this high school opportunity to then travel backward.

A couple of pictures. We currently run summer programming. Everything we do revolves around giving kids actual credentials. All of our courses are also 100% articulations with college credit, which has been exciting with our post-diploma partners in terms of essentially rebooting our programming to align with those college credits to accelerate a student who wants to go into an advanced degree in robotics or anything connected. There’s a photo on this slide that’s kind of fun in terms of one of the student prototypes when they were actually doing some underwater data collection. Finally, just because I am watching the time, our latest and greatest sort of partnered opportunity, we house the LeMay America’s Car Museum. It opened in 2012 and at any given time has 300 of the most beautiful classic automobiles, with historic history at six floors. Through conversations with them, we are officially moving forward with a robotics hub. I keep calling it the garage. Naming rights are not there yet, but I still put it in. I’m putting it out into the world. But this robotics innovation garage will host regional competitions. The goal, I should be more correct, my superintendent were on this, he’d say global. The desire is global competition with the intentionality of physical space driving experience. That’s our latest and greatest. I will stop there, but I’m happy to answer any questions.

Tom Vander Ark: Adam, that’s a very cool vision. I want to underscore that you have this amazing museum, and you’re talking about building this companion space that could leverage it but be different from it and sort of imagine the next generation of mobility. Very cool opportunity for Tacoma. The Maritime Center is really, I think, unique because you’re imagining this as kind of a hub and spoke, so it’s not just what happens in that building, it’s the learning experiences that happen at partner schools and partner business sites. Is that fair? It’s sort of a community vision.

Adam Kulaas: We always just call it the hub, right? It is absolutely a hub and spoke kind of model. It has these tentacles, it’s gotta stay nautical, right? These tentacles out into industry partners, businesses, and even some of our community-based physical spaces like the Foss Maritime Museum, which has been a great partner in terms of teaching spaces. We have the Youth Marine Foundation with a $4 million teaching vessel that ultimately we will find integration in terms of partnership. Even some of our larger industry partners like TOTE Alaska, headquartered here, are doing some really cutting-edge stuff in terms of alternative fuel. What’s fun for me is that even the automation or the robotics side, like hull inspections that used to require divers and things like that, are now shifting quickly with urgency for safety and efficiency to operators actually utilizing or maximizing robotics to do a lot of that work.

Tom Vander Ark: Josh asked a question earlier about the mindsets and skillsets that you see younger learners, maybe elementary and middle-grade learners, developing through robotics. Any thoughts on that?

Adam Kulaas: Yeah, I think, and I dropped a kind of wordy thing in the chat, but I think for me, whenever I have an opportunity to watch, the competitive robotics side is beautiful on so many levels, right? You can see the personalization of what one student is getting out of the experience, tethered to the collaborative piece of a team, right? And multiple teams many times. We do a middle school jamboree, robotics jamboree every year. Watching that’s even more exciting because we’re getting them younger. In terms of priming, we are currently revamping, it’s a pride point. Our state probably doesn’t get excited, but we’ve submitted over 150 frameworks. So, in Washington State, I have to submit a framework in order to authorize the new course, and 150 frameworks in the last two years. That might be conservative because we’re seeing opportunities to essentially craft these pathways that then only enhance what our talented educators are delivering to kids. From a mindset side, I think modeling a lot of that and saying that we’re okay to renovate, and here’s how we’re doing it, is a fun sort of 30,000-foot example of what we’re seeing kids get out of the bottom-up experience.

Tom Vander Ark: Adam, you heard Axel put a competitive frame around a lot of what they do in St. Vrain, and not just robotics, but they really want kids to have a competitive skillset and mindset. I think you like that. You’re thinking about that with the garage. Is that a link to entrepreneurship? Adaptability? What do you think?

Adam Kulaas: I think it’s a link to resilience. Yes, I’m a huge proponent of competition fostering growth and fostering success. I think when structured in a meaningful way, it becomes less of the “I’m better than you” and more of the “we’re getting better together.” I even worked in our mantra of our district, right? Better. It’s this state of better together, like the newest one is team sport, right? I see this as a really cool launchpad to really engage youth in this sort of differentiated, right, bar setting in a category that I think is exciting and new.

Axel Reitzig: Could I add to that? In terms of building real, durable mindsets, and we refer to durable skills, which I like. But one thing I appreciate again about robotics is that it’s all done in a very authentic context. So, you think about the whole SEL movement over the last 10 years or whatever, you know, good stuff, well-meaning stuff, but it’s not necessarily authentic all the time, right? In robotics, if you want to be successful as a robotics team, you’ve got to get over all the little things, and you’ve got to work together as a team, and you’ve got to put up with all the failures that happen and so forth and so on. I think the authenticity of robotics is super, super powerful.

Tom Vander Ark: All right, you robotics as youth development. You heard it here. Two great examples from St. Vrain and from Tacoma Public Schools. Ritch Ramey, thanks for kicking us off with an overview of where robotics and robotics ed are going. Mason, take us out.

Mason Pashia: Thank you, Ritch, Axel, and Adam for joining us today and sharing such wonderful things. As always, my email is there. If you’re working on robotics and you want to put something up on our blog, feel free to shoot me a note at [email protected]. We also have our next town hall coming up. I just dropped a link in the chat. We’re going to be looking at state R&D capacity co-hosting that with Education Reimagined. We’re taking a look at Virginia and North Carolina’s approach to state R&D, and we’ll be joined by some of their state-level teams. We’re super excited to keep going with all of you. Thank you for joining, sharing generously, and we’ll see you next time.

Guest Bio

Adam Kulaas

Adam Kulaas, based in Puyallup, WA, US, is currently a Director of Innovative Learning and CTE at Tacoma Public Schools. Adam Kulaas brings experience from previous roles at Tacoma Public Schools, d3LX and Getting Smart. Adam Kulaas holds a Graduate Degree/Certificate in Educational Leadership and Administration @ City University of Seattle. With a robust skill set that includes Educational Leadership, Educational Program Design, Change Management, Curriculum Design, Instructional Design and more. Adam Kulaas has 1 emails on RocketReach.

Axel Reitzig

Axel Reitzig serves as the Executive Director of Innovation at the Innovation Center of the St. Vrain Valley School District, where he is dedicated to developing innovative and high-quality programming across the district. He emphasizes the importance of collaboration and communication through team-building activities like Minefield, which underscore the significance of guiding and working with individuals who have varying levels of experience and understanding. This philosophy is reflected in his approach to education, where he draws parallels between the minefield exercise and the diverse challenges within the educational landscape.

Axel believes in the value of collaboration between PK-12 and higher education to develop capable individuals ready to succeed in a complex world. He highlights that while the vision of both educational levels aligns, their approaches might differ, necessitating effective communication to prevent efforts from counteracting each other. Through partnerships, such as the ongoing collaboration with iSAT and CU Boulder, Axel has enhanced the educational experience by leveraging expertise from higher education, fostering a mutually beneficial relationship that enriches both the PK-12 and higher education landscapes.

Ritch Ramey

Ritch Ramey has spent more than 35 years in the advanced manufacturing field promoting education and workforce development. As the Director of Education at the Association for Advancing Automation (A3) Ritch is able to support and develop educational programming and workforce development initiatives for our more than 1300 members. He enjoys promoting career exploration and training in the smart manufacturing, Industry 4.0, robotics, and automation fields. He is skilled in program development, marketing, public speaking, grant writing and adminsitration, training, curriculum development, Learning Management System Platforms, coaching, and Computer-Aided Design (CAD). He has been a local, regional, and state SkillsUSA CAD contest Coordinator. He also coordinated Ohio Vex Robotics State and local contest for many years as well as Outreach Director for the National Robotics Challenge from 2003 until 2022.


Ritch, as a PLTW certified instructor, has taught Digital Electronic (DE), Computer Integrated Manufacturing (CIM) and Engineering Design and Development (EDD) high school courses. Ritch is also certified and has taught Yaskawa Industrial and Collaborative Motoman Robotics, FANUC Robotics, Universal Robots, Parker Hydraulics, Rockwell Allen-Bradley PLCs and SolidWorks classes. He takes great pride in being a professional and has a Bachelor of Science in Advanced Technology from Bowling Green State University and an Associate of Applied Science focused on Engineering from Marion Technical College. He also completed the Career Tech Education Certification from the University of Toledo.


Ritch also serves on the Arm Institute Educational Work Force Advisory Committee and has received various awards and honors such as the Marion Technical College Hall of Fame 2021, ARM Institute Champion Award for 2022, and the National Robotics Challenge Dr. James Hannamann award for 2019.

Tom Vander Ark

Tom Vander Ark is the CEO of Getting Smart. He has written or co-authored more than 50 books and papers including Getting Smart, Smart Cities, Smart Parents, Better Together, The Power of Place and Difference Making. He served as a public school superintendent and the first Executive Director of Education for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

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