Brandon Franck is a kind and supportive high school teacher. He does a variety of hobbies: mainly rock climbing, construction, and robotics.
Franck became interested in teaching when he was in high school.
“I was probably junior or senior year of high school, believe it or not, I really liked history classes, and I had some really good history teachers, and I thought that would be a good career choice to teach history, which is not what I’m doing now, teaching engineering and construction,” Franck said.
Franck loves that what he teaches in schools is useful in everyday life.
“A lot of what I teach in this class, I’ve used, or have experience. So in my previous house, I finished the whole basement, from plumbing to electrical to walls and everything…. and it’s not that I’m building a house from scratch, but, I can put together what I need to do to be a homeowner, and then just fix things around the house, not having to spend money, hiring someone, to fix something. How many thousands of dollars have I saved because I’ve done something myself?”
One of Franck’s hobbies is rock climbing. He is the sponsor of the Rock Climbing Club at Central High. They meet both at the PCH Climbing Wall and at Upper Limits. Upper Limits Rock Climbing Gym organizes a series of climbing competitions for high school athletes.
“I started the Climbing Club after a student approached me while teaching the Spark Engineering program at Parkway Central High,” Franck said. “I wouldn’t be doing it for so many years if I didn’t think it was fun and valuable for students.”
He also does robotics. The Parkway Central Robotics Team is a competitive robotics team. They build, code and drive their robots with the goal of doing their best at competitions. The robotics team competes using VEX robotics. VEX Robotics is a platform that offers educational and competitive robotics programs and products for students of all ages, fostering STEM learning through hands-on robotics experiences.
His goals for this club are mainly getting kids to learn how to problem-solve.
“The biggest value that I see with the robotics team is, and it’s not just for those that want to go into STEM like it’s really just that problem-solving… So just like with any muscle, you have to train to lift heavy things, right? You lift weights, you have to keep on training with problem-solving that can transfer to any career. You’re always perseverance and all the things,” Franck said.
Franck acts more as a coach at the climbing and robotics clubs, offering advice and setting students up with the right resources.
“Even with the robotics team, being creative is something (where) you have to come up with some creative solutions and ideas,” Franck said.
Franck mentions the difficulty of finding funding and time to build and practice the robots.
“One of the main challenges is time and money, those two things. It’s expensive to buy stuff,” Franck said. “We meet after school twice a week, but to be competitive that’s not enough.”
Franck’s favorite class is civil engineering.
“It’s basically everything that’s built around us, like the engineering behind it, roads, bridges, houses, structure, all the man made world. And it just fascinates me how things are made. And kind of to counteract that, construction tech is the hands-on side of that, which is a really fun class to teach,” Franck said.
