Fifth-grader Grayson Zrelak crouches over a pint-sized robot in his Longwood dining room and frowns. The bot looks like a tiny Mars rover and is supposed to follow a strip of blue tape along the floor, but each time it hits a right turn, it stops.
He turns to a computer, searching for a glitch in his programming. “Wait, I have a simpler idea,” he says, making a series of clicks. “OK, I could go here ... “
As a survivor of Hodgkin’s lymphoma, Grayson – like most kids with a serious illness – missed a lot of school, falling behind his peers. To bridge the gap, tutor Megan Nickels – an assistant professor at the University of Central Florida – has captured his attention through robots.
To make robots, it turns out, kids need maths.
“I don’t just want them to catch up,” she says of her students. “I want them to see mathematics as relevant and beautiful. I want them to be able to imagine a [successful] life for themselves.”
At 35, Nickels has earned a doctoral degree in mathematics education and is using robotics to help kids with cancer, sickle-cell disease and HIV-Aids. She wants to both develop their intellect under the most challenging of circumstances – including, often, in the hospital between surgery and chemotherapy – and to give them back a sense of control over their destinies.
She aims to bring those lessons to children’s hospitals throughout Central Florida.
Her first student came by accident three years ago, while Nickels was still working on her doctorate and looking for a way to volunteer. At the Children’s Hospital of Illinois, there was a 14-year-old girl who needed a tutor. She had just had a brain tumour removed.
“She had this throbbing incision, and in the half-hour I was there she threw up twice, got a shot in her thigh, had her mom and grandmother and several brothers and sisters in the room having a conversation, the TV was on and the doctors and nurses were coming and going,” Nickels says. “And I’m sitting there with a page of 50 fraction [problems] saying, ‘Um, you feel like trying this?’”
When Nickels walked out that day, she made two promises: Teaching these children would become her life’s work – and she would never do it this way again.
So she bought a robot kit. She had never built a robot herself, but she figured she’d learn alongside her students, and that maybe the work would be compelling enough to overcome the considerable distractions of being sick.
“It’s not just something that’s useful for them; it’s something that can open up all these amazing possibilities,” Nickels says, noting the current emphasis on STEM education. For children with critical illness, a lot of their opportunities are taken away” – both because of the long absences and because some therapies cause long-term cognitive effects.
As the American Cancer Society reports, more than 80% of childhood cancer patients now survive at least five years. Many are cured.
When Nickels took the teaching post at UCF a year ago, she wanted to continue helping those kids, even after they were no longer in the hospital. As she applies for grants for future projects – including one from Nasa that would bring space-oriented curriculum to patients at all three local children’s hospitals – she offers free teaching to young survivors such as Grayson, who underwent surgery, chemotherapy and radiation for Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Nickels also teaches Grayson’s twin sister, Avery, under the theory that siblings shouldn’t miss out on the “fun” simply because they’re healthy.
“It’s great that she includes them,” says Terri Jones, founder of BASE Camp Children’s Cancer Foundation in Winter Park, where Nickels has volunteered. “We see how excited all the kids get when she comes here. It’s not just that the robots are cool; it’s also that Megan’s cool. ... She’s not some old schoolmarm telling you to do your math.”
Part of what makes the robots attractive is that the kids are the ones in control. Many have endured being poked, prodded, operated on and filled with chemicals. But as Pamela Carroll, dean of the UCF College of Education and Human Performance, says, with the robots, “the children have choices; they make decisions for themselves. Those are powerful tools.”
Michelle Zrelak, Grayson’s mom, says her son’s introduction to robots has changed everything. After he missed the final few months of fourth grade and spent the summer at home to protect his compromised immune system, Grayson struggled in school, she says. And nothing seemed to ignite his intellectual curiosity until he met Nickels at a BASE Camp event, showing off her robots.
“He just went on and on and on about how some lady came and worked with robots and he was so excited and he could do it too and there was this paper I needed to fill out,” says Zrelak, mimicking her son’s sense of urgency. “This has turned on a light in him.”
Though Grayson has returned to public school and his cancer is in remission, Nickels still comes to the Zrelak home once a week to work with the twins. Grayson has managed to teach himself programming and talks about becoming an engineer.
Because, as he’ll tell you, nothing beats building robots.
“I think it’s awesome,” he says. “It’s probably the best thing I’ve ever done.” – Tribune News Service