With the incredible leadership of Splunk’s Black Employees And Mentors (BEAMs) employee resource group and many Splunkers (myself included) taking advantage of the company’s paid Volunteer Time Off policy, Splunk appeared in Austin, TX to help The Hidden Genius Project put on a Tech Slam Formula 1 event for local Austin high school youth to learn about the intersection of sports and technology. This event included an interview and meet-and-greet with McLaren driver (and incredibly nice guy) Lando Norris, presentations on how Splunk works with McLaren’s real-life Formula 1 and eSports Shadow team, and The Hidden Genius Project alumni putting on STEM workshops with Sphero robots for the attendees of the event.
During this event, a moment of tinkering over lunch started as a notion that I often have, as someone who makes a living figuring out how to generate meaningful data about the inner workings of a company where “Turn Data Into Doing” is the tagline: “I wonder if I can pull this into Splunk somehow.” That’s a very thirty-six-year-old thing to think, but as it turns out, the seventeen-year-old version of that notion is much more distilled: “I wonder if I can do more with this.”
It doesn’t really matter what “this” is. They can do more, and they want to do more, even if (especially if) they don’t consciously know how intuitive they are yet. We can foster that growth and intuition to challenge them wherever they are in their journey. Sometimes, though, that’s an advanced enough proposition that it manifests as something you yourself explore with them. Sure, book learning and following directions have their place, but when a young person figures out how to figure things out? When you color outside the lines with them? When you help them hack their own STEM lesson? When they realize just how free they really are to explore what their potential is?
That’s the “eyes lit up” moments we do this for. Now, getting here was its own journey for me, so let’s go back a bit.
Wait, You Can Do That?
During downtime between these STEM workshops and presentations, I had a moment out loud that got the attention of some alumni around me: I picked up one of the Sphero BOLT’s they were using for an obstacle course activity and went, “This thing has a lot of sensors on it, I wonder what we can do with those… do you all mind if I borrow one of these?”
“I wonder if I can pull this into Splunk somehow.”
Up to now, their concept of these robots had been “these are used for the Sphero STEM workshops to help demonstrate programming to attendees” and “we can drive these around when we have downtime.” Which, as their intended purpose, is totally fine! The alumni were doing a great job of putting this workshop on and clearly knew their stuff. So when one of them went, “Wait, you can do that?” and I replied, “I don’t know, let’s find out,” this suddenly became a STEM lesson in itself. Not about programming, robotics, using Splunk, anything specific like that… but about problem-solving the unknown-unknowns.
So we cracked open my laptop, grabbed one of the BOLT robots, and because I had literally never seen them before in my life, they helped me learn how they’re controlled; this was now everyone educating each other, instead of just me imparting knowledge in a lesson. They didn’t know it at the time, but they took stock of what was known and the angles of the problem we had to work with, and meaningfully worked to baseline everyone on the team. We’re already getting into some deep “applied learning” territory: there was no lesson plan for this, there wasn’t any documented process for this, and we didn’t even know if it would work, so we were all just learning by doing and seeing what stuck. They were already doing great and heavily vested in what was transpiring because, go figure, teenagers love doing stuff you’re not supposed to be able to do.
Evolving Past The Student/Teacher Barrier
This turned into, “Let’s see if I can get this app you’re using to control them onto my laptop because maybe there’s more than just a tablet program,” and sure enough, there was. A quick Bluetooth primer for them (and an Apple ID reset for me, which got some rightful Gen Z teasing) later, and we had a Sphero BOLT paired up to my laptop and connected inside the Sphero Edu app. This was already beyond what these alumni thought was possible, and even if we stopped here, I would consider that a success because the seed of, “You can do more than what you think,” was already planted. But we didn’t stop there, we poked around in the Sphero Edu app and learned (together!) how it worked. We, through a lot of trial and error that I walked these alumni through the thought process of, successfully controlled a Sphero BOLT with my MacBook Pro.
If you poke around the menus inside the app enough, you find “Sensor Data” in there. The fact that these teenagers had the same “aha!” reaction that I did at the same time is something that sticks with me even as I write this, maybe more than the rest of it. I was going to say that they had a very adult reaction to having a breakthrough in a situation, but maybe it’s us that sometimes still have a youthful reaction to having a breakthrough. But we knew we found what we needed, and we saw exactly what sensors were on the BOLT and that we could export them in a well-structured comma-separated value (CSV) file. Which, you know, Splunk can read.
They were still asking questions as I was firing up Splunk on my laptop, too, talking about what a terminal is and the concepts of a front-end (graphical) interface and a back-end (terminal) interface as they watched it load. Intelligent questions. Questions they were asking unprompted to build on the knowledge they already had. They wanted to know how Splunk worked, and not just in the high-level way we had talked about earlier that morning. They wanted me to explain what that CSV was, how that translates into Splunk, every step of ingesting that sensor data. They wanted to know what I was thinking and doing as I was teaching them things, and that is how you know you’re succeeding as an educator: when they’re transcending the lesson you’re giving and making it their own.
When It Clicked
Then we needed some data. We got a baseline of it from rolling the BOLT around on the desk we were using, but I wanted more prominent numbers. I saw it had accelerometers on it, so I did what any rational adult would do: I threw it as hard as I could into the couch next to us. Knowing how much these cost now, and that they were (sorry!) not mine, I probably wouldn’t have done that… but hey, we got that data! We saw what I did reflected in Splunk. We did something, start to finish, that we didn’t even know was possible when we started. Turns out these Sphero BOLT units are sturdy, too, because luckily (I’m still sorry!) I didn’t break it and get us all in trouble. Plus, for emphasis, teenagers love doing stuff you’re not supposed to do.
We figured out that you could now run races on their obstacle course and pull data on the Sphero robots in said races. Data like, “What was the top speed of the fastest robot,” or, “What was the shortest distance a robot took to finish the course,” was now possible to see. If we could work out how to do that in real-time, we could show live positions and telemetry on the track. The possibilities started stacking up, and then all of this came together in a way that even I didn’t see at the start.
What we’re talking about right now is what McLaren does at scale.
That clicked. I heard the clicks from them. Maybe it just clicked for you, too. The realization that we just did, functionally, exactly what Formula 1 teams do. Sure, they have way more sensors and a slightly less spherical vehicle, and they’re not trying to do this off a MacBook Pro in a hotel conference room, but the end result looks strikingly similar. The alumni had already seen the presentation we were giving about how McLaren uses Splunk, so this revelation had a perfect-10 landing in their brains. We went from something we didn’t even know was possible in the first place, and ended with a real-world application.
What We All Learned As Peers
We worked out how McLaren got to the spot they did with Splunk; it was no longer some abstract “that’s cool” concept to these teenagers because they know how it happened, and more importantly, how they could make it happen too. We made our own “that’s cool” moment. It was most definitely “we”, too: the alumni and I worked together as peers, and that’s really important for me to highlight. I may have more knowledge about what was going on than they did, but we were all equally along for the ride.
This story resonated with the high school students that came to see presentations in the afternoon, too. They had done the Sphero workshops. They knew what Formula 1 was. I just had to make the connection, nudge them over that bridge, and listen for the click. I heard the clicks from my Splunk colleagues when I told them this story. Hopefully, it clicks for whoever is reading this. We’re hoping to foster even more clicks like this in our partnership with The Hidden Genius Project, too, because it’s one of the most powerful sounds to hear from a brain still trying to figure out what it’s capable of.
Maybe someday those black young men will be engineers for McLaren or Splunk. Even if they decide that’s not their path, at least now they know for sure they can be, and what that looks like if they do want it. Sometimes all it takes to establish that is giving young people the opportunity to color outside the lines, hack their own STEM lessons, and surprise themselves when they capture the data to explain what really happens when (yes, still sorry) an object is thrown into a couch.
— Chris Doebert, Staff Observability Strategist at Splunk
