News

Taken from ABC News By KAREN MATTHEWS The budding entrepreneurs wore glasses made of wooden tongue depressors to pitch their idea for glasses with a chip that lets you find them from your phone. "And they'll have windshield wipers, so when they're dirty or get water on them, you can wipe it up," said Azariah Drungo, a fifth-grader at Public School 307 in Brooklyn. Azariah and her classmates spent the past week developing product ideas and as part of a mentorship program that sends engineers and designers from New York City's burgeoning tech industry into high-poverty public schools. Backers hope the...

Taken from Fox17 BY ERICA FRANCIS WYOMING, Mich -- A little girl from Wyoming is hoping a new set of hands will give her a new sense of confidence. Baylee Sherman born with amniotic band syndrome, which left some of her fingers bonded together and others shorter than the rest. After FOX 17 aired Baylee's story in March, we received multiple calls from people who wanted to help Baylee feel more comfortable in her skin. In a few short weeks, three students at the Kent Career Technical Center will build the little girl two pair of prosthetic hands with the skills...

Taken from The Hechinger Report Column by CHRIS BERDIK On a  recent Saturday at Einstein’s Workshop, a maker space outside Boston, boisterous kids were busy with Legos, mini motors and gears, magnetic tiles, pipe cleaners, posterboard, markers and tape. In a side room, about a dozen elementary and middle school students were learning computer-aided design (CAD) for 3D printers. Their instructors shut the door, but couldn’t completely keep out the creative chaos. Nor did they want to. Like all educators mixing high-tech with hands-on, they faced a familiar challenge—the freewheeling, playful problem-solving that comes naturally to kids using blocks or...

Taken from Belleville News-Democrat BY MARY COOLEY STEM learning — Science, Technology, Engineering and Math — is far from copying complicated formulas from a chalkboard. Students have to be able to take the classroom concepts and apply it to their future real world, educators say, and that takes practice. The kind of practice that comes only in a STEM lab. “There’s certain skills (still necessary) — you have to know three times three is nine — but when you leave, do you know how to apply those same skills?” said Principal Skip Birdsong, of St. Teresa. “We all know someone...