Students and staff welcomed the new robotics teacher and Team 968 coach Jason Brown as an addition to campus this school year. After teaching for six years at Walnut Grove Intermediate School, Brown redirected his educational journey and is now back to teaching at the high school level. Brown has taught science and robotics for 21 years and hopes to incorporate his experiences and ideas to campus.
Brown realized he had a passion for teaching when he was a student aide for his engineering teacher in high school. He began teaching at Los Altos High School as a student aide. Brown left Los Altos High school in 2008 and continued teaching at La Puente High School.
Now taking on an important role for the robotics program, Brown has many new concepts that he wants to incorporate to the program to make it more advanced and sophisticated.
The robotics program consists of engineering techniques that can be applied to build inventions.
“So we have a bunch of different projects that we’ll do… We’re gonna do some metal robots, possibly some drones later in the year… Eventually we’ll be doing 3D design and some printing with the robots,” said Brown.
Junior Joshua Beltran previously took robotics his freshman year with former teacher Emmanuel Parras. Beltran believes Brown’s teaching style will be beneficial to him because of how straightforward his teaching style is and looks forward to having Brown for the rest of the year.
“It’s pretty straightforward in there. With Mr. Brown, I feel like it’s more direct, like he really has high expectations for us,” said Beltran.
Sophomore Kobe Ma also took robotics as a freshman and finds the class to be more engaging this year with Brown’s instruction. Ma described Brown as a respectful, helpful and hardworking teacher. As a student that aims to pursue a career in engineering, Ma values the connections Brown has to the field outside of campus.
“…From what I’ve heard, seems like he has connections to other places too. So I believe it’s gonna be a really interesting year to look forward to,” said Ma.
Brown wants to expose students to robotics and engineering and hopes to inspire people’s future college majors or jobs. Along with that, he also looks forward to returning to teaching science related classes in a new way through the robotics program. He previously introduced this concept at La Puente High School and it was a success.
“…One of the goals for the future of the robotics program is to kind of rebrand it as engineering, as a broader concept, and try to make it count as a lab science class because there’s so much physics involved in it,” said Brown.
In reference to his time as a middle school teacher, Brown feels that he can’t do as much as he can with high schoolers, so he was excited to return to a high school environment to be able to work in a more advanced fashion.
“I missed high school. I can do bigger projects here. As much as I love teaching middle school with older students, you can do bigger projects. We’re also closer to the real world for you guys. So there’s different things I can do with you guys that you guys understand a little bit more at the high school level versus the middle school,” said Brown.
Regardless of the level, Brown looks forward to inspiring students and leading them to a career path involving engineering.
“So far, it’s been great. My students are good. The classes are good so far. So yeah, it’s a lot of fun so far, and I love seeing all my former middle school students too,” said Brown.
Along with being the robotics coach and teacher, Brown also previously coached soccer teams and is interested in continuing coaching now with his journey here.
“I’d like to, I’m trying to reach out to the coaches,” said Brown.
Whether it be in the classroom or the field Brown aspires to use his past experience to improve different organizations around campus.
