Developing a plan - Why Us?

The BUILD Program concept was developed and proven incredibly successful and valuable in government settings. The concept was then adapted for academia and the resulting classes, concepts, and philosophies tested in a two-year pilot at the University of Louisville.

The first question you might ask is “Why The BUILD Program?” Nearly everyone realizes we need more hands-on experience in school, exemplified by nearly every program now requiring a Capstone project. Nearly everyone recognizes the need for engineers to communicate across boundaries. Nearly everyone realizes we need teamwork as exemplified by lab courses working in teams. Every engineering college we’ve worked with to thinks they’re doing all this. But nearly every employer we've worked with realizes this has not been effective.

We believe we know why and how to fix it. We will answer the Why Us? question here.

We’re ready to take it to the next level. To be effective, it needs to be a national program that is specifically tailored to the individual needs of the local communities. What investments will be necessary to take the next step and scale it to a national program?

This will require a company dedicated to the BUILD program. To be commercially successful, we must expand to include a whole lot more than just developing courses and running them. Here is a sample of what we need to include:

Customer Service Management System

We have a lot of customer types. We have students. We have schools. We have mentors. We have sponsoring companies. We have engineering employers. We need to provide products and services to each of them that are so good they want to change the way they are doing things. This will be extremely difficult, especially with the schools who truly believe they are doing a great job as it is and don’t need major change. We need to do this in a way that makes things easier for them to do rather than giving them more work to do. We need to be willing to make tradeoffs that will enable this to be practically implemented.

Customer service in a business is everything. Schools, for example, do not want to change. They are too busy to take on new aspects of any program. We need to provide such great customer service that everyone in the program wants us. Everyone.

Amazon was willing to make tradeoffs others weren’t willing to make to solve customer problems. They stole the market. They looked at what would make customers happy. They were willing to give hassle free-refunds. They were willing to stop by your house with three deliveries on one day if that’s what would make the customer happy. Others were not willing to do these seemingly inefficient things. We need to be willing to take the little hits to keep sight of the big picture. We are willing to do this.

For the schools we are developing a franchise model. From the perspective of a school, the BUILD Program’s job is to make things easier for them. We will supply everything they need. For example, infrastructure-wise we supply:

• Furniture (e.g., benches, chairs, whiteboards)

• Fully stocked, well-organized (Impossible, you say? Here’s how we do it! ) and labeled benches

• Tools (e.g, soldering irons, screwdrivers, mills, lathes)

• Test equipment (e.g., Oscilloscope, VNA)

• Software (most of this will be FOSS)

• Consumable supplies (e.g., solder, wick)

• Project supplies (e.g., stock and parts)

• Posters

• Chamber kits

We give them ready-to-use but easily customizable course materials so that their courses are tailored for the needs of local employers. We provide an initial set of course materials they can use as long as they like. They will have access to course materials developed at other BUILD Program schools. They can also tune, develop, or co-develop tailored or fully-custom course materials serving the needs of their local community and employers as described in the University requirements and application process. This includes:

• Agendas

• Syllabi

• Lesson plans

• Course notes

• Course presentations

• Project descriptions

Turn-key BUILD labs

We are offering a several options including a turn-key solution to building the key lab spaces central to the BUILD program.

The White-glove lab option

If you choose the white-glove lab solution, we will show up and set up your entire lab spaces for you, and have them ready for classes to begin. When you open the door, you will have fully equipped benches will labeled drawers. Everything will be laid out and labeled identically to what the mentors used in their mentor training. You will have an organized, inventoried, and labeled tool system compatible with the BUILD system and philosophy. Your equipment will be plugged in, connected, tested, and fully functional.

The Self-setup lab option

If you choose the self-set-up lab solution, we will ship everything to you and provide drawer-by-drawer pictures and setup instructions. Everything will be laid out and labeled identically to what the mentors used in their mentor training. You will have an organized, inventoried, and labeled tool system compatible with the BUILD system and philosophy. We will provide an installation and test procedure and your lab will be ready to go and familiar to your mentors.

Functional , organized college labs? Really? Yes, really.

The reality is that the vast majority of college lab spaces are in a horrible state due to multiple users with insufficient accountability and insufficient incentive and motivation to do otherwise. Things are broken. Things are misplaced. Things are outright missing. We have fixed that.

This was one of our biggest challenges and sources of frustration when we moved from closed government labs into the open university environment. This sorely needed to be addressed. Yes, that is in bold, italicized, and underlined text. We have developed a lab philosophy and tool system optimized for handover between university teams making it trivial to know when tools are missing or misplaced. More than that, we made made it very easy to put things back into the correct place and know when you have slipped. We help you maintain an organized, inventoried, labeled, and inspectable tool system with a standardized daily check-in/check-out system useful for multiple classes sharing lab spaces. When students enter the lab, they go through a five minute procedure for verifying that everything is in the lab and in its place. When they leave the lab, they follow a five minute checkout procedure ensuring everything is in the lab and in its place for the next set of students. We instill a sense of pride in lab maintenance. This philosophy is built into the program at every step and instills pride and accountability of every member of every team.

Elite mentor training program

The mentor training program is at the heart of the program. We provide a full training facility with training rooms and fully functional labs with well-organized and labeled benches, fully stocked warehouses, training materials, bathrooms, a cafeteria, etc. The mentor training is intense and requires evening activities and entertainment. Our model for this training is a hybrid between intense the CORE ranch training in New Mexico and the incredible training program provided by the Kellogg School in Chicago. Mentors finish with the realization they have just attended the best training program in the world and pridefully carry it forward into their home BUILD program.

Convincing professors? Good luck!

The teacher training program is perhaps the hardest culture to satisfy. We have repeatedly learned that convincing traditional college professors that we have something to teach them is not easy. We will not have the intense, isolated, and focused attention from them that we get from the mentors. What can we do? We can make things easy for them. We can appeal to their need to off-load some of their teaching duties. We can appeal to their appreciation of unprecedentedly enthusiastic students. We can appeal to their need to fulfill traditional academic responsibilities such as generating publishable material.

That is not to say that we have had bad experiences with professors. Quite the contrary- we have had very good experiences with the majority of them. But our program has been very small and there has been a preselection of the most talented professors who have sought us out. We realize that to scale this program to the national level will require us to work with a broader population. Being cognizant of this is essential.