STEM graduation rates show uphill battle with math and science in School District

Students drive their underwater robot through a series of hoops during the 2011 Greater Philadelphia Sea Perch challenge. Photo: GPSPC

Updated, Dec. 5, 12:26p: Added total number of students graduating from 2005-2010 period, and total number of District enrollment to compare with STEM results; Corrected Womack’s title at America21 Project.

Last week at Drexel University, public school student teams kicked-off a five-month regional challenge to develop an underwater robot.

Students will prototype and engineer their robots until March of next year, when they’ll compete regionally for a slot at the second annual National Sea Perch Competition in Virginia.

At a local level, the competition is intended to show off the talent of students in the School District of Philadelphia and other regional public schools who spend hundreds of extracurricular hours building state-of-the-art robots with the help of dedicated teachers and industry mentors.

Teams gather around an indoor swimming pool, drop remote-controlled robots into the water, and are challenged to perform specific underwater tasks, like stopping the flow of a simulated leaking oil well, or propelling through a series of hoops.

“If people came to one robotics competition, they would be floored that our students do this,” says the District’s STEM Coordinator Kendrick Davis.

Advancing the priorities of math and science initiatives is a focus for Davis and his small team in the District’s division of College Readiness and Accelerated Programs. But the Sea Perch competition is launching at a time of great uncertainty for the school district’s education initiatives related to science, technology, engineering and mathematics, known as STEM.

Despite an aggressive federal push to prepare students for 21st century jobs, the School District’s perceived lagging prioritization of math and science education was amplified this summer by a budget crisis that is tearing down fledgling and disparate STEM efforts, leaving concerned citizens and stakeholders to move outside the system to fix the problem. Without improvement, they say, Philadelphia will have a hard time assembling a 21st century workforce that can rely on math, science and technology skills.

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Sheltr.org stars at Random Hacks of Kindness Philadelphia [VIDEO]

The Sheltr.org group, from L to R: Salas Saraiya, Robert Cheetham, Casey Thomas, Cheyne Rood, Mike Ball, Gabriel Farrell and Bula.

Sheltr.org, a mobile-friendly, web application to display nearby housing and food services for needy residents, was the featured tool at Random Hacks of Kindness hackathon held over the weekend at Drexel University.

The tool, built by a volunteer team of seven developers and designers, launched Philly.Sheltr.org, using available homeless intake facility information and a meal-providers data set collected by the Greater Philadelphia Coalition Against Hunger, said team members.

A representative of the city’s Office of Supportive Housing, who was contacted over the weekend by the team, said the department was interested in supporting the project, which could be used by service providers and the general public to more accurately direct distressed members of the street homeless population.

Sheltr was one of six projects created by nearly 40 participants, which also included non-developers, during the second local version of the global hack weekend led by a smattering of tech giants, like Google, NASA and the World Bank. This weekend, Random Hacks events were held in 34 cities, including Philadelphia. Locally, the event was hosted by Drexel University, led by PhD student Michael Brennan and sponsored by Voxeo Labs, CloudMine and, full disclosure, Technically Philly.

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MacBUS: the Macintosh Business Users Society has talked Apple since the 1980s

Chris Urban, the president of MacBUS, speaks at a meeting held in Connelly Auditorium in the University of the Arts.

The following is a report done in partnership with Temple University’s Philadelphia Neighborhoods program, the capstone class for the Temple’s Department of Journalism.

While most tech groups around Philadelphia were founded in the 21st century, the Macintosh Business Users Society, known as MacBUS, has been around since the Macintosh 128K computer in the 1980s.

Once a month, businesspeople, lawyers, engineers or retired persons convene to discuss the latest happenings around the Mac world and exchange tips and tech support from a business angle. The group usually meets the last Tuesday of the month in Center City. Membership is encouraged.

“MacBus was always specifically geared toward business users, it’s not so much for people who used their Mac for drawing, painting or writing, it’s for people using them professionally,” Chris Urban, the president of MacBUS, said. “They were doing pre-press, design, photography and anything else you can imagine using a Mac for professionally.”

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Web Start Women, Philadelphia Game Lab and more [Event Highlights]

Good morning, Philadelphia and welcome to your first Event Highlights column of December.

There were tons of events this week, it was hard to choose just three. And remember, you can get these highlights delivered to your mailbox every Monday at noon. It’s a great way to plan the rest of your week.

This week: Play games, finish that programming project and meet your friendly Philadelphia journalists.

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Pledge4Good, Snapline, Docphin and ThaTrunk demo at Philly Tech Meetup

Sponsor Twilio presents at Philly Tech Meetup last night

Philly Tech Meetup’s last event of 2011 was indicative of the entire year: more startups, more people and more excitement.

The ever-growing spin-off of New York Tech Meetup that features local startups demoing what they’ve been working on held its “November” meet up last night at Quorum in University City. Four local companies were on hand for demos.

Recaps after the jump.

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Technology often a vehicle for fraud, waste, mismanagement: City Controller Alan Butkovitz [Q&A]

City Controller Alan Butkovitz and his office are good at finding the lede.

The elected official charged with auditing city government and council spending continues to make news by highlighting the most egregious examples of waste, fraud and mismanagement.

Like yesterday’s announcement that half a billion dollars of taxpayer money is being managed by outdated, unsupported technology from 1996 in the city’s procurement department. Or an October audit that showed, among  other shortcomings in the city’s often criticized Sheriff’s office, that its less-than-stellar website had apparently cost $2.9 million over five years. (Yesterday, a sheriff’s employee was charged with a scam that bilked the city out of $400,000, ahead of state Rep. Jewell Williams taking office in January.)

In his second term since first being elected to the position in 2005 following a 15 year tenure in the state House of Representatives, Butkovitz, 59, seems to enjoy the gig. He is serious and detailed, eager to discuss the 400-page audit report on the Sheriff’s office one recent November afternoon, with a tuft of his gray hair falling toward his cheek in a sunny corner office of the Municipal Services Building in Center City.

Butkovitz, a resident of Castor Gardens in the Northeast,, has not been without his critics. In his 2009 Controller campaign against a younger, more progressive tax advocate, Brett Mandel portrayed Butkovitz as a machine politician who focused less on auditing each city agency as the City Home Rule Charter [PDF] requires and more on bigger, headline-grabbing and politically-strategic investigations.

Still, with increasing frequency, Butkovitz’s claims of waste, fraud and mismanagement at the city level involve technology: IT infrastructure, agency software and the shortcomings of it all.

Below, Technically Philly talks tech, taxes and hackathons with the West Philly native and graduate of Overbrook High School and Temple University.

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T-Mobile unveils 11 remodeled retail stores in Philadelphia region [VIDEO]

Pitching it as a pre-holiday house cleaning, nearly a dozen T-Mobile retail stores were completely remodeled, aiming to streamline sales and reduce customer wait times. Altogether, 20 stores are sporting a new look in the region, and some 400 nationwide.

Video above is of a Seattle-area store remodel.

AJ Daulerio named Gawker editor [LINKS]

• What does Philadelphia spend? [PhillyDeals: Inquirer]
• A to-do list for city commissioners [Philly Clout: Daily News]
• Rob Stuart, 49, Phila. activist [Inquirer] — We sadly missed this, but the Center City activist, famed for lobbying for creating the Schuylkill River trail and consulting on nonprofit uses of technology, died at 49 last month. More here and here.
• Churchville native @AJDaulerio named new editor of @Gawker Being replaced @Deadspin by Tommy Craggs. [PhillyGossip on Twitter]
• Go Crowdless: Philly’s Neiman Group Making NYC Less Aggravating This Holiday Season  [Geekadelphia]
• Philadelphia Schools Invited to Exclusive Online Dating Website [Geekadelphia]
• Geek of the Week: Brad Guigar, Graphic Artist & Webcartoonist [Geekadelphia]
• Motorcyclist dies after crash at racetrack [Courier Post] — Michael A. Moore, tech lead and principal for Vanguard
•  Service Provider Offers TLM Application to Efficiently Manage Workforce [Press release] — “SaaShr.com Announces Partnership with ATR Systems”
• PHA to auction individual vacant properties [PlanPhilly]
• Forbes Names WebiMax One of America’s Most Promising Companies [Webimax]
• MRP Concert: New music and new sounds from a piano [LocalArtsLive]
• New Guinness World Record Holders: Biggest cheer for science! [Science Cheerleader] – In Trenton
• EDITORIAL: Pennsylvania crackdown on online sales tax sure to backfire [Lehigh Valley Live] — H/T PTN

Thanks to our weekly sponsors

Technically Philly is made possible by advertisers and sponsors that are important to Philadelphia’s technology community. This week we’d like to thank:

Newsworks — NewsWorks is the online home of WHYY News and its growing network of journalism partners. This public media service covers the Philadelphia region, Delaware and South Jersey, with a focus on regional issues, neighborhoods, health and science, and arts.

Morgan Lewis — Morgan Lewis provides comprehensive transactional, litigation, labor and employment, regulatory, and intellectual property legal services to clients of all sizes—from global Fortune 100 companies to just-conceived startups—across all major industries.

Springboard Media — Springboard Media is a certified Apple Specialist and retailer with two locations in Center City, including its newest in Midtown Village. They’ve got a ton of accessories and a great trade-in program that can score you up to $1,500

Reed Technology — Reed Technology’s Web Archiving Service is a litigation protection, web compliance and e-discovery solution for all your online assets.

Your Local Security — Providing affordable home security systems in Philadelphia. Top of the line equipment and monitoring services from ADT keep your home and family safe.

Caffeine Fish — Caffeine Fish develops iOS apps including Trainboard and PhillySubway and offers consulting in the Philadelphia area.

MOGO Media — MOGO Media provides best-of-class training for designers and developers through world-wide conferences and seminars. The organization will host a Dreamweaver seminar on December 15 in Philadelphia.

Interested in joining these organizations and individuals in supporting Technically Philly? Check out our ad packages and contact our Ad Sales Manager. Can’t find something that fits? We’ll customize a package for you.

AboutOne raises $1.6 million from Golden Seeds

AboutOne, which we once called the “Basecamp for families” has raised a $1.6 million Series A round led by Golden Seeds, the angel investor network focused on women-led companies.

The Malvern-based company is led by Joanne Lang who got the idea for the company when she noticed her mother stuffing all of the family’s important documents into a shoebox.

From the release:

This latest round of funding will be used to develop AboutOne’s marketing campaigns and expand its engineering staff in order to accelerate product upgrades scheduled for the next six months. At the CES MommyTECH Summit in January, AboutOne will launch the beta release of its new AcornPoints rewards program, one of many enhancements to its calendar and contacts-based family management system.

The company also held a charity drive last month to raise money for three local charities.

The complete release after the jump:

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