Our Vision
Diversity, Entrepreneurship, Invention, and AI
“Necessity [purpose] is the mother of invention.” And an invention is an idea, that’s all. But an idea can be driven by vision, and vision, in turn, can be driven by hope. This is the beauty of combining the hope of an educator with the curiosity and purpose of an inventor. It is my hope that our remarkable post-millennial students will use 21st-century innovation to save us so that the same technology doesn’t destroy us.
Gary Sullivan, Ed.D., Executive Director
Vision is “the ability to think about or plan the future with imagination or wisdom.” I’d like to think that our vision for ExplorTech’s future is wise and forward-thinking, but the truth is it is just as much informed by successes and failures experienced since we hosted our first STEM camp in 2015, with just eight students. An intern suggested the name “ExplorTech” because we explore 21st-century technologies that represent our awesome ability to create. We combine mentorship and project-based learning to provide life-changing opportunities for our students, many of whom suffer the isolation of rural life, race, gender inequality, gender identity, or emotional stress, and simply need to experience a little success. Read more....
How we got here: ExplorTech 2015-2019
Our first summer camps in 2015 taught us how well students learn in a challenging, individualized environment, especially when given recent teaching technologies like MIT Scratch (2007) and Raspberry Pi (2012). Elementary and junior high kids instinctively learned programming concepts I had struggled to teach college students. So in February 2016, we founded ExplorTech, https://home/explortech.org, a 501(c)3 educational nonprofit, and dedicated it to providing STEM education for students in our rural area, especially those in small school districts, like Perrin-Whitt CISD, with just 350 students total. We offered summer STEM camps at city parks and recreation centers in 2016, 2017, and 2018. In 2017, we became a K-12 Affiliate member of the National Center for Women and IT, and eventually hosted a summer coding camp for junior high girls, designed and taught by high school Aspirations in IT award winner Kate Liang. And until the beginning of the pandemic, we participated in children’s STEM activities offered through SWENext, a K-12 organization organized by the Society of Women Engineers. All of this was ExplorTech 1.0, a learning and growing process. Read more....
I managed R&D and served on Gateway Computer’s US patent review committee for years. Gateway developed and patented smart TV before anyone called it that. So even our earliest STEM camps fostered student invention, and my home workshop soon became a place of invention as well, mostly producing devices targeting classroom and distance-learning applications. The microcontrollers, small-board computers, and electronics used in our STEM camps by day were also applied to improve our curriculum and instruction by night. Read more....
Where we are: Invent!
In February 2021, while on staff at Aledo High School, we discovered the Lemelson-MIT InvenTeam program in an Internet search. The application for the national invention team contest would be due in just a few weeks, but we applied. For me, it was a self-validating experience; much of the program’s design was the embodiment of what I had come to visualize for ExplorTech’s future, combining entrepreneurship, engineering, and invention into a program designed to produce truly professional quality work. It was an idea still unformed, and here was a program that had successfully implemented such a program for years!
At the end of the school year, it was time to return full-time to the nonprofit world. ExplorTech applied for and was selected to coach Aledo High School students through the final application process, due September 7, 2021. We hope to be selected to continue the program during the school year. Per ExplorTech policy, our time and materials will be donated to AISD and its students. Read more....