Robots, Ice Cream and Instagram: The Viral Mechatronics Lab Turning Engagement Into Employment - Danny Murphy, Mechatronics Professor at CVCC

After 20 years in automation and controls engineering, Danny Murphy received a call from a local community college that would bring his journey full circle—back to the kind of impact his own high school electronics teacher once had on him. Today, he’s a nationally recognized educator, named A3’s 2024 Educator of the Year, and he’s redefining what hands-on learning can look like in a modern mechatronics lab.

In this episode, Danny shares how early challenges in the classroom led him to move beyond textbook instruction and introduce student-designed projects with real-world relevance. From programming robots to serve cereal and slice cake to engineering capstone challenges with custom tooling, his students are learning by doing—and developing the kind of technical and creative skills that employers notice.

What began as a simple effort to share classroom activity on LinkedIn and Instagram has evolved into a powerful tool for student opportunity. With over 30,000 followers on Instagram and 11,000 on LinkedIn, Danny’s short, engaging videos have led to direct job offers for students, new partnerships with engineers and PhDs, and a growing network of industry engagement. The results are tangible: students getting hired, programs gaining visibility, and technical education reaching far beyond the classroom.

Listen to learn:

• How to transition from lecture-based teaching to hands-on, student-driven projects that boost engagement
• Why adding creative freedom to technical labs leads to better retention and real-world problem-solving
• A simple video strategy on LinkedIn or Instagram that can directly lead to student job offers
• What educators should consider before posting student work online
• How showcasing student work publicly can attract industry partners and grow your program’s reputation

3 Big Takeaways from this Episode:

1. Student-designed projects increase both engagement and retention. Danny’s students learn core concepts like user frames and loops by designing their own robotics challenges—whether it’s scooping cereal or slicing cake. This creative freedom forces them to problem-solve, adapt, and truly understand the material, rather than just following instructions.

2. Social media is a powerful tool for connecting students to real opportunities. By consistently posting short, authentic videos on LinkedIn and Instagram, Danny has helped at least six students get hired directly from what industry partners saw online. These platforms have become an extension of the classroom—offering visibility, credibility, and direct links to the workforce.

3. Giving students real-world skills—and a teacher who believes in them—can change their lives. From project-based labs to job-ready training, Danny’s classroom gives students more than technical knowledge; it gives them confidence, purpose, and a path forward. For many, it’s the first time they’ve been truly seen for what they can do—and that recognition can be life-changing.

Connect with Danny on Social Media:

Instagram  |  LinkedIn

Don't forget to Ask Us Anything!

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Transcript

Unknown: 0:00

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Matt Kirchner: 0:08

Welcome to this week's episode of The Tech Ed podcast. Before we get started this week, I have some exciting news to share with our audience. We are launching a brand new segment at The TechEd Podcast. It is called Ask us anything. You know, I get so many questions, whether it's on social media, people emailing me, people asking questions. At the many events that we are honored to speak at, every single month, there's such great questions, and we want to share the answers, not just with the audience members who ask them, but with all of our audience members. So every single quarter, we will do an episode of Ask us anything. The first thing to know is that you can submit any question for The TechEd Podcast at TechEd podcast.com/ask us anything that's TechEd podcast.com/ask us anything. Submit your question in that format. We'll get it. We'll make sure it finds its way into the next episode of Ask us anything. By the way, this is going to be moderated by our producer, who many of you know. Our producer, Melissa Martin, is going to moderate those discussions, and we will together answer the most important questions in all of technical education. Be sure to check it out. And now on to this week's episode. It's another week of The TechEd Podcast. My name is Matt Kirkner. Welcome in. As you know, we are the number one podcast in all of STEM and technical education. We are on a mission to secure the American Dream for the next generation of STEM and workforce talent, and as we do that work, we attract all kinds of amazing guests. If you listen often, you know that we've had several senators on the podcast, numbers of members of Congress, five governors, more than 25 fortune 500 CEOs have joined us in the studio of The TechEd Podcast, all on that mission, like we said, to secure the American Dream for the next generation. I will tell you, with all those incredible guests, some of the best feedback that we get from our audience is when we bring someone who is working the magic of technical education in the classroom, in the labs across the United States of America and beyond. When we bring those folks in to talk about their work, those are some of our absolute most popular episodes. We have that kind of episode for you here this week, my guest is Danny Murphy. Danny is a mechatronics professor at Central Virginia Community College. He's also, by the way, the A three Educator of the Year for 2024 and that is some pretty high standing. It's an honor for me to welcome to The TechEd Podcast, Danny Murphy. Danny, thanks so much for coming on. Really excited to be here. Thank you. You've got this incredible life story that I know is going to resonate with our audience. So how does the Danny Murphy of the last several decades come to be the Danny Murphy of today? Hopefully,

Danny Murphy: 2:58

most people that know me nowadays Think of me as a pretty even tempered and helpful type of guy, but I wasn't always that way when I was a teenager. I was, I suppose, the poorest representation of any teenager you could probably imagine, which led to my parents decided to kick me out of the house when I was 16 years old. For the first couple of days of that, it was sleeping on the friend's couch or whatever, until those opportunities quickly evaporated, and I found myself in some pretty, pretty dire straits. Slept in cars, slept in strangers, lawn mower sheds, and eventually found myself in a abandoned building that I could crawl into after high school. I kept going to high school, and as a matter of fact, that's important, because it was my electronics teacher, Steve Cosner, who noticed that I was getting a little worse for wear, and I still remember the way that he approached me and he said, Look, you look terrible. You smell bad. I don't want to really get involved with whatever's going on, but let's get your grades up to make sure that you can eventually make something out of your life. And he did with that sternly masculine way that only certain types of mentors can gently beach into shape, and I owe my life to that man. He found me a scholarship to DeVry University. I'm sure I would never have gone to college were it not for his intervention. In fact, I would most likely be dead in a ditch somewhere, such was my situation, anyway, so I was able to go to college, get a great education, get out of that and start a deeply meaningful career in engineering. And after about 20 or so years of that, I was approached by Marci Gale, who's the head of my department at CVCC now. And after a short conversation, she said, Would you like to be one of our electronics teachers? It was weird. I can't really describe the feeling I had during that moment. It was like, the whole universe went full circle. And it's like, oh, an electronics teacher like Steve Cosner, the guy that put me on the path I am today. And I remember thinking, I wonder if I do this, if I could ever possibly. To find a way to be as impactful to anybody's life as that man was to mine. And it turns out that people give teachers that opportunity about three times a semester. It's incredible the permission that our culture gives people in this role to be impactful towards other people's lives,

Matt Kirchner: 5:21

absolutely. You know, I talk a lot of times Danny about the whole idea that the real magic of a teacher and it doesn't matter what your path through education, whether it's formal or informal, whether it ends at high school or goes on to post secondary and beyond. Every one of us has three people in our lives that just took a chance on us showed us that we were capable of doing something that we didn't know we ourselves were able to do, put us on a career path that we never would have been on if it hadn't been for that individual. I love it when people name individuals specifically. So somebody like Steve Cosner that had such a huge impact in a pivotal and I mean that not just figuratively, but like pivoting from that challenge that you were facing and showing you a different pathway. It really, really underscores the value and the incredible change and impact that teachers, I think, sometimes in ways they know, and a lot of times in ways they will never know have on individuals. Have you stayed in touch with Steve?

Danny Murphy: 6:14

I know when a three reached out to me last year and told me that I'd won Educator of the Year, I had lost track of Steve Cosner along the way, and I believe one of my high school friends is a retired teacher in that area, was able to look him up, and he's retired now, and I got his number, and I called him and I let him know, hey, guess what's going on? This is some pretty big news, and it all directly translates back to the role that you played in my life, like so many people who were responsible for that type of influence, he just completely laughed it off. Was like, no, no, that's everything you're doing as a result of who you are. And I didn't do much, and we both knew that was and that was a little bit of a lie, and we kind of let it ride like that.

Matt Kirchner: 6:58

Yeah, well, Humility is a virtue without question, but what an incredible story that have, and what an incredible individual to have impact your life in that particular way. And I am glad, by the way, that you had an opportunity to go back and and let him know that, and whether I would just tell you, and I'm sure you recognize this, and you already alluded to it, whether he acknowledged it or not, that gentleman hung up the phone and probably was on cloud nine for the next week knowing that he had that he had that kind of an impact on you and maybe even beyond. So you mentioned some of the challenges as a teenager. If you don't mind me asking, Did you patch things up with your family? I mean, how did that go?

Danny Murphy: 7:32

I've thought about that a lot. I know that both of my parents, I learned my independent streak from them. There's often friction that comes with the participation in the dominance hierarchy that disappears once you're out of that situation. They often did their best to try to get me to come back home, and I want to make that clear that they were diligent in trying to take care of me at that age. But I wanted to see if I could do it. I wanted to see if I could make it without being anyone under anyone's roof, and it's only in retrospect that I can realize how difficult I made it for myself when it didn't have to be but at the same time, I'm delighted to have had that experience, because it really does turn the volume down on a lot of other conditions. The gratitude you have for just having a suitable temperature home to live in and some water and some food, it makes the rest of life a lot easier.

Matt Kirchner: 8:23

Absolutely, there's no question about that, and gives us a level of appreciation both ways, scarcity certainly gives us a level of appreciation for that. You know, when we do have those things in our lives, to recognize how important they are. So you better than anybody can tell a story like that, Danny. Tell me a little bit about Marcy. So this is the individual who said, Hey, again, a pivotal moment in your life. Somebody that said, hey, maybe you should try your hand at teaching how did that relationship come about? And tell me about that person. Marcy is

Danny Murphy: 8:51

a brilliant woman, and I'm delighted to be able to work in the same building as her. She's been incredibly influential. I'd reached out to Marcy at a company that I was working with because we needed a young engineering student or young technical worker. And we did what every company does to every school, is they call them and they say, We want your best student. That's always what you hear. Everyone wants your best student, and they all think that they deserve it. And then I called Marcy, and I said, I want your best student. She hooked me up with a young man by the name of Jesse Scott who was truly a brilliant and still remains a brilliant young man. I was talking to her about the program, and she asked me, she said, you know, if people with this type of technical capacity are important, then would you be willing to help write a letter to the state government and say that we need more attention to this mechatronics program? And I said, What's mechatronics? I've never even heard that word before. What's that made up? Garbage? It's a combination of mechanical and electronics and a combination of disciplines that rounds out automation. It's like, oh, automation. Why? I know what that is. And so I wrote the letter that said, we need to more of this type of education. And once I did, it was part of her. Effort that actually got more support from the state, and she said, we don't have enough teachers. Would would you like to teach? And it's funny, I think any engineer would agree with me that when an engineer is approached with, would you like to teach? What you know, it's like, yes, of course. I'll be the best teacher in the world because I'm the best engineer in the world. That's the type of engineering mentality. We're very ego forward. I remember my first couple of weeks in the classroom and thinking, Oh, wow, I have no idea what I'm doing, and I'm doing pretty bad, and everybody can see it. And it was a incredibly humbling experience. In fact, I attended several of Marcy's classes and sat in the back just to see how is a person supposed to teach, and I actually learned how to teach just by watching her in the classroom.

Matt Kirchner: 10:45

Interesting. So how long ago was that helped me put this into perspective. Has this been a few years now since you moved over to teaching? That would have been 2018

Danny Murphy: 10:53

So I'm coming up on my seventh year of teaching.

Matt Kirchner: 10:56

Yeah, awesome. So seven years in, and you were obviously in the engineering discipline before that. What kind of engineer you said you studied at DeVry? Studied At DeVry? Tell me about that. Well, I

Danny Murphy: 11:04

studied in electronics engineering, and when I graduated, I immediately went into controls. We had kind of three pathways at the school. There was networking, I knew I couldn't stand that. There was telecommunications. I didn't even really understand the basics of that, and it left controls. I was like, well, that's making machines move. That's cool, no matter who you ask. And right, it very much was. And so in 1999 I think I entered the workforce as a young engineer with zero experience at all, with far more confidence than I than I actually deserved, and I had been in automation ever since. So

Matt Kirchner: 11:39

1999 to 2018 you're in automation. You're in controls engineering, doing really, really cool stuff in and around manufacturing. 2018 you make the switch to education. You already chatted a little bit about some of the challenges and adjustments that take place when you step into the classroom and all of a sudden the spotlight is on and students are expecting you to be delivering learning at a really, really high level, which I know you're certainly able to do. But let's go back to that 2018, time frame and talk about what the classroom felt and looked like when you first stepped into education, and then we'll talk about how it's evolved since then. So

Danny Murphy: 12:12

my first class, I believe, was in the basement of the framatome building. It was across from the machine shop, and it was an overflow classroom. I remember my first class in PLCs. I was teaching the students what PLCs were, and, by extension, a little bit of electrical theory. And I was in the middle of making a spiral with my finger to describe how a magnetic field would propagate around a path of current flow. When a student interrupted me maybe about 30 minutes into the lecture of programmable logic controllers and and he said, Hey, what's a PLC? Yeah. And I realized that I had been talking for however long about the automation and everything, and I'd completely, completely leap frogged all of the basics in any of the context that would have helped them apply it to their level of knowledge. And it was at that point where I thought, oh, man, you know what I'm what am I going to do? I really don't know what I'm doing. And ever since that moment, I've realized that in the classroom you're going to have people from all all backgrounds and all levels of expertise. And if you don't really flesh out that basement, if you don't really build the foundation forum of what everything rests on top of, you're effectively building a house of cards. And I think a lot of people make that mistake. They assume that the people in their classroom have the experience with the prerequisites that they need in order to have the understanding that they need to build on top of, and so often that's not the case. I mean, I was one of the worst students I can think of. I was so bored in the classroom, I rarely could pay attention. I was good on tests somehow, but you automatically flush all that information and and I found that an integral part of my teaching style since then is to spend far more time on the basics than you think you need to, because if you don't have those, then you really don't have anything.

Matt Kirchner: 14:05

Absolutely, you know, the story you just told takes me back to a couple different ones, some when it comes to PLCs. The first one is the I ran for 10 years, a spin off of Rockwell Automation. And so, you know, you think about kind of the behemoths and in controls here in the United States, you've got companies like Siemens. We've had Barbara Hampton, who's the CEO of Siemens, USA, on the podcast, Blake Moret, who's the chairman and CEO of Rockwell Automation, has been on but for 10 years, I ran a spin off of Rockwell Automation, and my first week in running that company, and I was the chief executive of the company, we were a tier one supplier to Rockwell. And somebody said, you know, was pointing at a production part, and they're like, well, that goes into this part. That goes into this part of the PLC. And I asked the same question. I'm like, What's a PLC? They're like, wait a minute, you're running a tier one supplier to Rockwell Automation, and you don't know what PLC stands for. Fast forward from that 20 some odd years, and I get into the education world. And I was with a group of high school educators, Danny, and I was talking about. PLCs. And I was like, you know, this is a PLC. And we were talking about a mechatronics trainer, actually, in that case, and talking about how the PLC controlled the manufacturing operation and so on. And finally, one of them raised their hand, and they're like, I get it, but what do professional learning communities have to do with this? I'm like, No, not that kind of PLC. We're talking about programmable logic controllers. But you're exactly right when you think about meeting that student where they are. So we gotta do all of this with important context. And we bought. We gotta do it also in a way that makes the learning fun and engaging. And talk about was that model there 2018 when you started teaching, and over the course of the seven years now that have ensued, how have you made learning more fun and more engaging for your students?

Danny Murphy: 15:41

I often thought when I was sitting in class in college. Now, DeVry did a fine job, but I was particularly scatterbrained student, and I was always finding myself thinking about something else and and never really focusing. Really what I would focus on the most is how much longer do I have before I get out of this and go out to do whatever I need to do. It took me a little while, maybe half a semester, to realize that I was committing the same atrocity that I'd criticized others on. I'd always said, if I was going to teach the class, I'd make it fun. And, you know, everybody thinks that, but what they don't understand is it's not just make it fun. It's so much more workload for the instructor to chart a course through the learning process with different activities. And I've noticed that. I'm sure many people who are listening right now have noticed this too, that in the last probably decade or so, our social media use, our device use, has really limited everyone's attention span. There's actually statistics on this of how your attention span right now, you're doing good. If you can make it two and a half minutes. It used to be 10 minutes. And once I really realized that, once I really started looking at my students as I was teaching them, and you can see that moment where they go from engaged to their eyes being glazed over, once their eyes are glazed over and they're not really following you, you might as well stop talking because they're not learning. And I found that the best way to keep that attention was dynamic volume, with storytelling, and especially with transitioning the type of media with which you were using to present the material at about every two and a half minutes. So I learned that if I'm going to talk, I better say what I need to say within two and a half minutes, and then I better show a video. And when I show that video, it better not be a 15 minute YouTube video. It better be a short and when I do that, I ought to transition to hands on activity. Now, hands on activity you can make go for longer than two and a half minutes, but you can't make it go for two and a half hours. So it's a constant cycling between things that activate different portions of the brain and keeping the student awake. You

Matt Kirchner: 17:47

know, it's interesting that you say a couple things there. You know, number one, and we talk from time to time on the podcast. I have the opportunity and the blessing of being able to keynote events quite frequently. It's probably at least once a month, a lot of times. Might be even two or three times a month that I'm in front of an audience and and delivering a keynote on one topic or the other. The last year or two, it's been a really around artificial intelligence and applied AI. But the the content has changed over time. The one thing that doesn't change is the importance, I think, as a speaker, of keeping the audience engaged. And as I try out new content, because I always try to keep the content fresh. And it doesn't mean that I never repeat a story or never use the slide in two keynotes in a row, but over the course of six months or a year, that presentation will completely evolve, because I'm constantly replacing older content with new content. So you try out the new content, and the thing that I look for is watching the eyes of the audience, and you can just tell by looking at their eyes whether or not the intent that you had of whatever new thing that you put into that presentation or that speech is resonating with the audience, because you're right when that when the eyes go blank, or you see people start to yawn, or someone's looking down at their phone, or whatever it's like, okay, that part of the presentation wasn't engaging enough. I've got to find a way to make that more engaging. And I just see an incredible parallel between what you just said there in terms of engaging classroom learners and engaging students in a, you know, an applied, hands on way and and keeping them engaged in the learning. You know, we talk in our businesses about sending a message, and it's you can't tell somebody something once. You have to tell them seven times seven different ways, your idea of changing the media by which you're delivering the message really, really aligned there. I think the other thing that you and I are super aligned on is the importance of not just doing great presentations, but getting the students engaged in their learning through projects. And I know that's a key part of your program. So talk a little bit about the projects your students are doing and not just that, but also what kind of feedback you're getting from

Danny Murphy: 19:38

them. That's a great point. I'm glad you brought it up. The students don't come to school to listen to me talk. We live in a world where if they want to listen to somebody talk about how to do something, YouTube is free. They don't have to pay to come to listen to me. They have unfettered access to brilliant presentations, wonderful animations. What my role in that should be is the person that can allow them access. Access to the tools and the equipment that they actually need in order to learn themselves. And I think some of the most successful projects I've tried to work on are not only hands on with real world equipment, but they involve some kind of creative decision making from the student. And I'll explain what I mean. When I started my robotics class, I was trying to approximate fanics handling tool program. And of course, there's several different topics you have to go through, and a book that goes along with it that explains it perfectly. And it's important to follow instructions in order to become a technical worker, because there's so many instruction based things that you have to do, but you're not going to retain the tasks that you do off a list. And so how do you do it? Well, how I do it is, I spend a little bit of time with the students in the classroom saying, Hey, this is what we're going to learn today. Let's say it's user frames, or let's say it's some kind of loops. Here's why they're important. And what I want you to do is, I want you to create an exercise for yourself where you get to employ these principles by doing whatever you want. The only criteria I have for you is that you have to display a mastery of these techniques, and it has to be cool enough to be interesting to me, and that's an unusual criteria for students to hear, is that it has to be cool and it has to be fun, right? And the exercises that that builds are the types that I make videos about and post on social media, where student will bring in a box of cocoa puffs and a gallon of milk and a couple of bowls and and we'll take ladles and we'll protect the robot, and they're, they're trying to write a program to scoop the cocoa puffs out of the bowl and to make a bowl of cereal. Or one team might have a jello mold and create jello and try to put jello in something, or even something to where, if it's a simple conveyor exercise in PLC class, who are you're conveying a box? Well, I've found an old alarm clock that it looks like bacon, and we called it Mayor mcbaikin For some reason, and we taped him on the top of the box. And now the exercise isn't about conveying a box from the upstream photo eye to the downstream photo eye. It's about conveying Mayor McBain down the conveyor and not allowing him to fall off the end. And it seems like so many silly, zany or otherwise ridiculous little spices that you can throw into your lab become the memorable portions of that lab. Sure, by by definition of the word that which is out of the ordinary is something that you're more likely to focus on and remember. Well, if you remember that creative element, that fun element that causes you to engage, or you remember that odd element that's associated with the lesson that you are trying to teach in the first place, and so you're allowing there to be a link to something they're likely to remember, to this thing that they need to remember

Matt Kirchner: 22:59

absolutely. You know, you think about like all the mnemonics that I used to use when I was going through my post secondary journey to memorize things and and that was what is all about. Was it was to create some, take something that you can relate to and then use it to memorize or remember or learn something that kind of rides alongside of that, I think, to some of the even reading through some of the memory books and so on, understanding how individuals have created systems for remembering people's names or remembering a list of items or what have you, and you've got to anchor it to something memorable. The bigger and the larger that experience, and the more that that kind of plays right into your haptic zone, the more memorable that's going to be. And that's exactly what you're doing with the learning. I'm glad, by the way, that you're protecting the robots while the students are doing things like ladling milk and moving seriously around the workspace and so on. That's and jello too. They probably don't play really well with robots. Fair to say,

Danny Murphy: 23:54

we go through a lot of duct tape and a lot of trash bags. So yeah, if I could bring up two, of course, I'd skipped over a little about the students creative engagement. Okay, that's important too, because just last night, we finished up the capstone projects in the robot lab. And one thing that a student chose to do was bring in a cake and bring in two different types of ice cream and multiple different types of sprinkles, and they wanted to have the robot cut the cake, spatula it onto a plate, and then change tools, grab a ladle, grab some soupy ice cream, drizzle down over top of it. And in their mind, they'd had such a clear picture of how they were going to do that, technically, instructionally, programmatically. But what they learned in that process was how many of the things that you're unlikely to encounter verbally in a classroom can possibly go wrong on a project, on an engineering project, on a programming task, everything that can go wrong does go wrong. And the student experienced this, and while they. They absolutely accomplished the programmatic portion of their lab. They found so many challenges that were unexpected, that cost so much time. And I think that's important for students who are likely to go on a commissioning trip, to realize is, if you're budgeting for a 12 hour trip, what are you going to do if it takes 40 hours? What's right? How long do you spend on various portions of the project? And the thing that's interesting about it being their own choice is, if it was my lab that I told them to do, once things start getting frustrated mentally, anyone's going to start blaming the instructor for not preparing them well. But if they chose that task themselves, right? They're much, much more incentivized to stick with it in order to prove to themselves that they can get it done. And I think that's an important part of curriculum development that's often overlooked.

Matt Kirchner: 25:51

So prove to themselves and prove to you, right, as their teacher and their instructor, that they've got what it takes

Danny Murphy: 25:56

to be able to their classmates, yeah, and their classmates while we're at it, yeah. And there's pride that goes

Matt Kirchner: 26:00

along with that, and there's a tiny bit of shame that goes along with failing at that as well. Certainly, okay. I mean, not everything goes perfect in the lab in a college environment or on the manufacturing floor in a manufacturing environment. And so just to paint a little bit of the picture for our audience, a lot of us are spent a lot of time around industrial robots. A lot don't what you're talking about is doing this with like a six axis robot. Think about if somebody had to program their own arm from their waist all the way down to their fingertips, and rather than just automatically knowing how to ladle milk into a bowl, that you had to program and tell every single one of your joints exactly how to do that and where it needed to go, and in some cases, the path that it needed to take. All these things that we do intuitively, somebody's got to program a robot to be able to do that, and those are the kinds of things that your students are learning. I love this example of the cake and the capstone project from this week. Am I going to see that on social media? Is that going to show up on LinkedIn?

Danny Murphy: 26:52

Yeah, I actually filled up my phone memory with taking video of that particular project. I'll probably be putting that out by the second week of May.

Matt Kirchner: 27:00

We'll keep our eyes open for that in the second week of May, and I believe this particular podcast is probably going to drop right about that same period of time. We'll see if we can't find some links to put in the show notes as well so that our audience can check that out. How long have you been posting on social media? What got you started with that?

Danny Murphy: 27:15

I would say it's been more than two years. I don't know if it's been three years, though, I was never much on social media, just the culture that I grew up in looked down on social media use as a silly toy for people that didn't get out in the woods enough. And that's the kind of the way that I felt about it, too. And I was on LinkedIn, and LinkedIn was my social media of choice, just because it seemed somewhat more serious and useful than some of the other social media platforms. When I started, and I was reading through about different engineers that had opinions on education in our country, and universally, the opinion that you read is they don't teach in schools what you need in industry, and there's a lot of that going on. To be fair, teachers will talk. They'll have dry lectures about something that was only relevant 20 years ago, the instructor maybe had never actually been in industry to know what was important. And I was thinking about some of these horribly negative comments that I was reading and thinking, this is inflammatory, but there's a lot of truth in what they're saying. But my classes, I feel like they're different. You know, I do come from industry. I spent a long time in industry, and the things that I teach aren't necessarily the things that I find in textbooks. They're the lessons that I learned by my own mistakes in the field that I want to protect my students from having to repeat. And so at first I thought, well, I'll argue with these comments. And then I remembered that arguments and comment sections of social media never go anywhere productive, right? So I thought, well, what I'll do is I'll take my Android and I'll film what my students are doing in my lab, and I'll make my first post, and I'll just show people, Hey, this is what I'm doing to make it seem useful for their future employers. So I took a video of some robot, some robot lab, I posted it up, and the very next day, I had a call from an employer in town that I hadn't been aware of before, and they said, We want to hire the guy in the gray shirt. And I was like, do you mean Mike? And you're like, we don't know, just the way he was using that robot, that's exactly what we need. This is a great lesson. And so I talked to Mike, and he was like, Wow, that's incredible. Mike ended up going to work for that company within the last two weeks, and I thought, That's awesome. If I have this kind of power on my phone, well, I'm kind of ethically obligated to use this now. And so I started producing maybe one or two videos a week, and I'm not a videographer, and I'm not particularly creative in that aspect, so a lot of them were quick cuts of what was going on in the classroom. I learned very quickly that I had to apply the same principles to my videos that I applied to my lectures in that they can't be long and rambling. I have to have really short. Cuts a video, it's not two and a half minutes in a video, it's 1.6 seconds per scene I found as the hot spot, and so I started posting one or two videos a week, and so far, I think I've had six students get hired from companies that they weren't in contact with, exclusively from being seen on my videos recently, and I've had a PhD in material science and a master's in machine learning, see my videos, be excited about what was going on in my class, and volunteer to come in on several occasions to help with my class. And it's astounding the power we have, through this everyday form of communications, to collaborate with people that we never would have met. And I think it's a brilliant model that more people should be using in their own teaching. And

Matt Kirchner: 30:45

I want to get into in a minute some of the advice that you might have for other educators in terms of how they become more active on social media. Before we do that, you used a term in that last answer that I want to make sure wasn't lost on our audience when you had this young man named Mike who got hired literally because you took the time to post a video of his work on social media. You said you feel like you have an ethical obligation to do that kind of work after it worked the first time. Why is this so personal to you? And tell us a little bit about more why you would look at that as an ethical obligation, as opposed to just something you would do because you want to be a great instructor.

Danny Murphy: 31:20

I think if any of us are the type of person that wants to see those within our sphere of influence succeed, then we're responsible for doing whatever we can in order to make that happen. And that's just kind of a basic cause and effect action. I'm sure a lot of it is based off of my own realization of where I would be were it not for the intervention of my electronics teacher earlier. I know that I have the power, somewhat accidentally, to impact the students in my class. And if I have that power, and if I choose not to use it, then it's the same as doing the opposite of what my and their goals is.

Matt Kirchner: 32:02

It's really, really well put, and it really speaks to at the heart of the magic and the incredible impact that the teachers and instructors have, not just on their students, but on the entire world and all of these people that you're reaching with incredible stories on social media, is having that effect. Clearly, having that effect. Talk about the other types of you mentioned the post of Mike. You mentioned the post of the robot making the cake. What are the other kinds of things that people might see if they look you up on social I've

Danny Murphy: 32:30

found along the way, as I post various types of content that what people are most interested in is probably what they lacked themselves in the classroom, and that's laughter, and that's creativity, and that's fun, hands on learning cooperatively with other students. I find the more I just display that the more people it resonates with, not because of anything I'm doing, but because how many of us sat in the classroom and listen to somebody drone on about something they knew wasn't relevant at the time, and how many people would have much rather been in a kind of adult playground to where they could have just experienced the tools that they knew they were going to have to use later on in a creative environment that allowed them the opportunity to make mistakes in a safe place. The types of posts that I've made that have gotten significantly less resonance were times where I'll speak over top of a compilation and I'll tell people what I think about something I've learned very quickly, people don't want to see me, they don't want to hear me. They want to see what's going on in my class. And at first, that was kind of humbling, but I completely understand that there's two types of people that I think really resonate with my content. That's people who were bored in the classroom and wish they would have had the experience that they're seeing. And then there's the people who are in the workplace now and wanting some evidence that somebody that they're about to hire might have any experience with a tool that's relevant to what they'll be getting paid to do. I'm

Matt Kirchner: 34:10

actually fighting the temptation right now to go down my rabbit hole of my education journey, which is exactly what you just described, and that is wondering for literally 14 years, or whatever it is, even longer than that, I guess what I was doing there and when I could get out and actually do the fun stuff, and seeing the kind of content that you post, it really does exactly what you just described. It brings in any of us, and there's so many of us that are like, wow, education. I grew up thinking that I was wrong for education, and it turns out that education was wrong for me, or at least the style of education that I was getting in a lot of ways. And that's not to take anything away from incredible teachers and people that took an interest in me and so on. And I don't have any regrets, but, man, that journey could have been so much different. If people want to see all this content, Danny that you're posting, you mentioned LinkedIn. Are there other platforms that they'll find you on? Sure. Danny

Danny Murphy: 34:59

Murphy only. In and I'm underscore Papa Murph on Instagram, a lot of times, my videos that I post on LinkedIn will be edited in a somewhat more professional way to appeal to that demographic. The things that I post on Instagram are largely formatted to appeal to my demographic there, which is engineering students in their 20s. I got about maybe 30,000 people following me on Instagram, maybe 11,000 on LinkedIn, which aren't huge numbers, but they're big for me. Those are

Matt Kirchner: 35:30

pretty significant numbers. Sure you're reaching a lot of people go ahead. Well,

Danny Murphy: 35:34

thank you. I appreciate that. And so on Instagram, there's occasionally slightly more modernized music that I'll ask my students, like, hey, what music is cool? Because if it was up to me, it would be all 90 scratch music,

Matt Kirchner: 35:46

which is also cool, but maybe not meeting the right audience

Danny Murphy: 35:49

that still certainly finds its way in there. Just because sometimes I want to make something for me, but a little bit a little bit more mean content, but I try my best not to make it stupid. I find that sometimes, once people establish some following, it often becomes the case that you get more followers when you appeal to the lowest common denominator and you see the cartoonization of their content over time. And I'm trying to make sure that doesn't happen, because I'm not in it for the followers, and I'm not in it to appeal to the dopamine chasers I'm in it to advertise for my students, and also above and beyond, advertising for my students, to just put the message out there that, hey, education is meaningful and it's delightful to improve yourself. I love

Matt Kirchner: 36:41

that education is meaningful and it's delightful to improve yourself, and that is what it's all about. All in the pursuit of not just awesome careers, which I know you're pretty you're putting a ton of young people into, and people of all ages, I'm sure, into really, really cool career pathways, but also for the sake of just bettering ourselves and recognizing that there's a greater part of life that comes with knowledge and comes with understanding, and I know that's all part of what you're delivering in the classroom. Lots of educators doing, or at least working on, doing the same thing. Let's kind of pivot a little bit now, dandy to advice for other educators. One part of this question is, are the things that you found on social media, in being active on social that have surprised you. You mentioned a couple stories already, but anything else you would add, and then in responding to that, also a little bit about, if I'm an educator who would love to get started doing the same kind of work that you're doing, but have no idea where to start. Where would you start? So something that would surprise them, and then where should they start? So

Danny Murphy: 37:39

the thing that I found most surprising was the toxicity of some of the people who anonymously hide behind their profile to make comments, a lot of what I have to do after I make some posts, especially, much more on Instagram than LinkedIn. LinkedIn is people are on their best behavior because that's where they find jobs when they don't have them. Instagram, on the other hand, there's a lot of angry and frustrated people in the world, and it's particularly uncomfortable to realize that that anger and frustration often should be channeled inwardly, and so we take it and we just spray it outward onto whatever seems beautiful. And I've had a lot of comments about young men and women in my posts, I try to stay on top of it so that I could delete it as soon as I see it. I learned very early on don't try to argue with negativity, because it just spirals into more negativity. So I police my content so that hopefully no student who is ever delighting in the fact that they're being congratulated on social media has to go to a section where someone is just being hateful about the clothes they wore, or whether or not they think they agree with that person's lifestyle. That was surprising for me, especially. There was one reel that I had blow up. I think it reached 800,000 viewers. And you know, when you have 800,000 people, imagine how many comments that are negative? If you

Matt Kirchner: 38:59

it only takes a few, right? Yeah, absolutely. Point 1% Yeah. So

Danny Murphy: 39:03

that was the surprise. As far as getting started, some educators will have a steep hill to climb. I've talked to educators who let me know that their college or their high school has specific strict rules against videoing students, regardless of whether or not you have a release waiver, you, by the way, get a release waiver and ask the students, 100% ask the students which one of you mind? Here's what I'm planning to do. I would like to advertise for you, and I think you look great while you're doing this. I don't want you to be embarrassed. Who wants to be a part of this, and the students who don't want to be a part of it, make sure that you leave them out of it. Make sure that they don't think while they're working that they're being filmed. You know, be very respectful of that. But importantly, it takes an incredible investment of time to build a social media presence. There's times I wake up at two in the morning and I can't sleep, and I go on LinkedIn, and I try to make 50 connections before I go back to. Sleep before class. That

Matt Kirchner: 40:01

says a lot about you in a lot of different ways. Probably have a whole conversation about what you just said, but continue. Well,

Danny Murphy: 40:09

one thing that I've been trying to do to help other educators is to allow them to piggyback off of the effort that I've already put forth to build a platform I've been doing a little 30/92, teaser interviews with other educators that I'll post, and I'll add them as a collaborator, in the hopes that some of the people that view my content will also go and follow them. So if anyone's interested in building the same type of social media network, please reach out to me and I'll see if I can interview you would put you in the spotlight and feature you

Matt Kirchner: 40:42

awesome. That'll all be in the show notes too. If people are looking to find out how to contact Danny Murphy, we'll make sure you can do that right through the show notes. So absolutely terrific and great advice. What platform would they start on? Danny? I know you said you started on LinkedIn. Is that where you would recommend an educator start? Should they be on Instagram? Should they start making tick tock videos? What's the best spot? I haven't gotten

Danny Murphy: 41:02

big on Tiktok, just because earlier, when I was starting to do this, I worked for a state school. There was actually rules against using Tiktok because of the national involvement. But Tiktok is certainly quite popular. I would think that the platform that the individual chose should probably at first be a reflection of that person's personality. How about that? So someone who is interested in making slightly more professional content, slightly more conservative content, LinkedIn is a great place to do that. If the person's more fun and exuberant, maybe Tiktok or Instagram would be a better place. But to be honest with you, try it all and throw the spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks, see

Matt Kirchner: 41:45

what resonates. Really good advice. Anything you do differently in the last two and a half years that you've been active on social

Danny Murphy: 41:51

Yeah, actually, my activity on social media has taught me how to be a more patient person and less prone to react negatively to a negative comment. I know the first several negative comments that I got on some of my posts, my instinctual reaction would have been to say something nasty back and then three minutes later, delete it when I found out that I'd been a jerk. But it teaches you to be more of a public figure, and it teaches it taught me anyway to be a stronger representative of a benevolent force out there into the ether. I've found people especially on I found this on LinkedIn, an engineer might look at something I have in a video and say, Oh, you're doing this wrong. You should be doing it this way. And if you can push down that argumentative instinct and just say, Wow. You know, I bet you have a lot of experience with this. Could you teach me something about how to do this better? Teach me based off your experience? Well, most engineers, and I can say this as an engineer, spend their entire life in a cubicle, and the only time anyone talks to them is to criticize them for something that might not even be their fault. So if you take the spotlight and shine it on them and say, Thank you, teach me what you know. 80% chance you've just made a friend for life. Absolutely,

Matt Kirchner: 43:10

that's really good advice. I like the way you started that by Hey, this is how we reacted and some of the challenges we've had with the negativity and then rolling into putting the spotlight on an individual and maybe changing their life in a huge way. Thinking about not just negativity, let's turn it to positivity and also things that can change lives and in a huge way. We mentioned in the intro that you were the 2024 a three Educator of the Year. You've got to be just tremendously proud of that. Tell us about what that recognition means to you.

Danny Murphy: 43:40

I was unbelievably excited to receive that award, and what it taught me is, if there's going to be some global entity out there that is bestowed on me the title of Educator of the Year, I really need to up my game to deserve that. It's a call towards more action, if anything else, it caused me to really rethink a lot of what I had assumed my own limitations were, and to see how to exceed that. I currently maybe help 60 or 100 students a year. I need to find a way to change that to 600 or 1000 and what can I do to share that the reward with others who have earned it at least equally well, and perhaps more than me,

Matt Kirchner: 44:24

it's amazing. As you were saying that I think about the effect that a teacher and instructor has on a student, and that whole idea of raising expectation and showing a student that they're capable of doing something more, and sometimes just the act of an instructor saying, here is an expectation. This is something you're really, really good at this is something that you should be recognized for. Almost instills in them this desire to do even more. And it sounds like this recognition did exactly the same for you.

Danny Murphy: 44:50

That's right. That's exactly right. How many times have students across the world seen the F on their paper or heard you're not very good at this? But if you look at a student directly in. Their eyes, and you tell them, I know that you could achieve this, and I believe in you. That's fuel. It's absolutely

Matt Kirchner: 45:07

fuel. It gives them the confidence to at least give it a shot. And somebody believes in them, somebody they don't want to let down, and somebody that they want to have enjoy that level of success right along their side, which I know is exactly how you're doing things in the classroom. I think we've got time for two quick questions here in the time we have remaining. Danny, the first one, actually, both of them are ones we'd love to hear from our guests about. And the first question is, tell us thing in education. We've already heard a number of them. But is there something about your educational journey, or something about education in general that you believe strongly that would surprise other people,

Danny Murphy: 45:41

I believe that your attitude towards what you can do and how you interface with the people around you is perhaps more important than your innate technical ability. If you behave yourself in a way that anyone wants to be around you and you chase what's your best presentation of your own skill set, often you're going to perform better than someone who is ridiculously good at something but has no drive.

Matt Kirchner: 46:09

Isn't that the truth that it's you know, you can be really, really smart, you can be really, really talented, but if you're not doing it for the right reasons, you're not motivated in the right way, or you don't have the ability to interact, and it's with and inspire others in a certain way that that innate talent, or that talent that you've gained over the time the course of your life, can only go so far. I think that's a really, really poignant point. I'm also looking forward to the answer to our last question, which given where we started this conversation in the life story that you have, and where you were as a 15 or 16 year old, I'm curious to know this one again, it's a question that we ask every guest, but in your particular case, and a particularly insightful one, I think if you could go back Danny, to that 15 year old Danny Murphy, and give him one piece of advice, what would you tell him? I would tell

Danny Murphy: 46:55

him you're not nearly as smart as you think you are, but you can be infinitely smarter than you think you can become.

Matt Kirchner: 47:02

That's beautiful advice, and I will tell you that you have been infinitely, probably smarter and infinitely more influential on the lives of young people and people of all ages than I'm sure you ever could have imagined. Not just through the magic you work in the classroom, Danny, but through this incredible reputation and this incredible channel to people out in the world of education, in the world of technical education, engineering students thinking about what the world could be for them, I want to thank you not just for being a great guest on The TechEd Podcast, but for the incredible work you're doing on behalf of technical education. Thank you so much for being with us. I appreciate it. What a terrific episode we had with Danny Murphy. I learned so much about the passion that he has for technical education, the incredible dedication that he has for his students. We need more teachers like Danny Murphy. If you enjoyed this episode as much as I did, you are definitely going to want to check out the show notes. We will put those at TechEd podcast.com/danny, that is TechEd podcast.com/d, a n, n, y. We heard all about Danny's social media handles, and you will find those in the show notes as well. So check those out. If you are into social media, like we are, like everybody is. You can find us on Facebook. You can find us on tick tock. We are on Instagram. We are on LinkedIn. We are anywhere you go to look for social media, and when you get there, say hello, we would love to hear from you, and we would love to see you next week on The TechEd Podcast. Until then, I'm Matt Kirk. You.