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Summer of STEM
US2020 Celebrates STEM Mentors and Announces New Partnerships with Alcoa and Raytheon (Engineering.com)
Reaching underrepresented populations with STEM opportunities is what US2020 is all about. Their goal to match one million students with STEM mentors by 2020 requires dedicated STEM professionals and corporate partners. They have reason to be excited about both. Theyve just announced the winners of the 2015 STEM Mentoring awards and have added and expanded mentoring opportunities. Leaders from public, private, and social sectors gathered at the White House today to discuss successful strategies in STEM at the 2015 STEM Mentoring Awards. We recently discussed the importance of STEM Mentorship, and this years winners emphasize how well it can work. As part of a national competition, winners were honored in the categories of Most Innovative Hands-On Project (Chicago Student Invention Convention and University City Science Center FirstHand), Excellence in Volunteer Experience (Iridescent and We Teach Science) and Excellence in Corporate Culture (IBM and NetApp). These organizations were selected from more than 80, which represented 30 different cities and 13 states.
STEM education gets million-dollar boost from Google Australia (Sydney Morning Herald)
Katherine Allen was heading down a scholastic path familiar to many top-tier students, one that would have led her to a well-paid career in law or medicine. Then came the epiphany. Katherine stumbled into the world of electronics and engineering with FIRST Robotics Australia, a non-profit organisation which runs programs in which high school students design and build robots to compete against one another. Now the year 12 Hornsby Girls' High student hopes to study biomedical engineering and apply her interests and skills to the frontier world of implantable devices, tissue engineering and hi-tech prosthetics.
New Program Rallies Low-Income Students To Compete in STEM Competitions (The Journal)
To win science research competitions, which often herald college studies and careers in STEM disciplines, students first need to enter. But low-income students may lack the support they need to participate in those activities. Now the Society for Science & the Public (SSP) is piloting a new program specifically to recruit advisors who can advocate for those students. In its first year, the program expects to draw between 30 and 50 low-income students. SSP is a non-profit that promotes public engagement in science and science education. Each year it runs several education competitions, including the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair and the Intel Science Talent Search. The organization recently received a $100,000 grant from the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, enabling it to pay out in $3,000 stipends to teachers, counselors and scientists nine in all to coach small groups of students in grades 6-11 in how to participate in science contests. The foundation supports the education of "exceptionally promising" students with financial need.
Teens Show Off Engineering Mettle With Pasta Bridge Competition (Mind Shift)
Imagine having to build a bridge a strong bridge out of nothing but epoxy and spaghetti. Yeah, hard. Just ask one of the 160 high schoolers who recently finished Engineering Innovation, a rigorous, monthlong summer camp run by Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and a handful of other cities. They didnt just have to imagine it; they had to do it. Students come from all over the world to get what is, for many, their first real taste of engineering in the classroom. The idea behind the program is simple: Give students a chance to explore complex ideas using remarkably simple tools. Example: Measure the distance between two spires on the Hopkins campus using nothing but a few measuring sticks, string and tape.
Industry
Rensselaer STEM Education Pipeline Initiative Highlighted in Nature Geoscience (Rensselaer)
Nature Geoscience today featured news of a climate board game and downloadable teaching module developed by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute students and faculty in collaboration with Troy High School. The article written by collaborators Megan Fung, a Rensselaer graduate student, Rensselaer Professor Mimi Katz, and Troy High School teacher Laura Tedesco is part of a series on STEM education appearing today in Nature, Scientific American, and Nature Geoscience, publications of the Nature Publishing Group. In the article, Games and climate literacy, which appears in the Correspondence section of Nature Geoscience, the authors discuss how they used game-based learning to engage students in science, and specifically in learning about climate, how humans impact the environment, and the future implications of climate change.
Agriculture has been separated from science education, study suggests (Farm Futures)
University of Florida Institute of Food and Ag Sciences research Katie Stofer says agriculture has been effectively separated from other sciences. Stofer, an agricultural communications professor who surveyed 29 science museums in cities of all sizes across the U.S., found that the word "agriculture" is unlikely to appear, even though exhibits may relate to ag or ag practices. To make the list of large science museums in the survey, the facility needed a budget of at least $10 million annually and at least 200,000 visitors. The results showed that none of the facilities included the word "agriculture" in an exhibit title or description, but Stofer says about 45% of the 316 exhibits could be categorized as "probably" agriculture related at the least, based on exhibit titles and descriptions.
Girls in STEM
Helen Gurley Brown Scholars Redefine Cosmo Girl (NYTimes)
Given an opportunity on a recent Friday to tour a magnificent New York City four-story penthouse apartment sitting atop the Beresford, one of Central Park Wests most famous buildings, a group of 15 teenage girls did what teenage girls do: snapped a bunch of selfies. Snap! With braces shimmering against the sunlit splendor of the whole of lower Central Park and Midtown Manhattan. Snap! Against the backdrop of a wall of glamour photos of celebrities (Phil Donahue, Joan Crawford and Robert Redford) of whom most ninth graders have never heard. This wasnt just any quadplex penthouse apartment (not that any quadplex penthouse apartment is). It is the apartment shared by the legendary Cosmopolitan magazine editor. The occasion was the graduation of the first class of Brown Scholars: high school girls who, over the course of a semester, spent 120 classroom hours at the American Museum of Natural History learning how to write computer code.
120 Girls Join the First-Ever WiSci: Girls STEAM Camp (GirlUp)
What happens when you bring together 120 girls from 9 countries to learn from each other and from experts in fields such as robotics, technology, and computer science? Pure brilliance. As I write this, 30 girls from the United States and 90 girls from eight African countries are sitting side-by-side at the Gashora Girls Academy in Rwanda. They are there to participate in the first-ever WiSci: Girls STEAM Camp, a 3-week camp focused on Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics (aka STEAM) education. This is so important. In the United States, women make up 47 percent of the workforce, but only 24 percent of the STEM workforce. Fields such as science and engineering are traditionally dominated by men, and we need more girls pursuing these fields and preparing for the jobs of the future.
Government and Public Policy
Science and Technology Partnerships Grow in South America (US Navy)
Scientific diplomacy took a giant step forward as Chief of Naval Research (CNR) Rear Adm. Mat Winter officially opened the new Office of Naval Research (ONR) Global office in Sao Paulo, Brazil, July 24. ONR Global - charged with providing international science and technology (S&T) solutions for current and future naval challenges - engages with the international S&T community around the world. Officials noted that the new office in Brazil will be critical to the advancement of open-source, unclassified knowledge and collaboration in a region marked by rapidly-expanding economies and significant growth in cutting-edge science. "The opening of the Sao Paulo office reflects the strong, longstanding S&T relationships ONR has with the international community," Winter noted. "This office will serve as a regional hub for collaboration with researchers across South America to share discovery and invention, which are the lifeblood of scientific advancement."
STEM Innovation
9 Ways That Cities Are Creating Tech Communities That Support Civic Innovation (Fast Co. Exist)
 How can cities truly embrace technology to improve their operations and provide better public services? Despite no shortage of focus on this question, citieswith their entrenched ways of doing things and cautious approachhave struggled on this issue. A new report called the Citie Framework attempts to provide answers. It advocates a link between local communities of tech companies and innovative governancea kind of "feedback loop," if you will. "While city authorities cant create tech communities or entrepreneurs, what they can do is optimize the policy levers that are within their control to design the best set of conditions for innovation to flourish," it says. Citie is a new collaboration between professional services firm Accenture, Nesta, a U.K. innovation agency, and Catapult, which runs a series of government-backed innovation centers in Britain. The initiative looks at ways cities can support innovation and entrepreneurship while at the same time helping cities themselves to be more tech-savvy. |
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Stay Connected       
 STEMconnector®
STEMconnector and MIND Research Institute to Host Town Hall on Game-Based Learning
 STEMconnector®, in collaboration with MIND Research Institute, will host a STEM Town Hall on August 25th entitled "Leveraging Game-Based Learning to Increase STEM Engagement." The Town Hall will take place from 2-3:30 pm, and will be hosted via Google+ Hangouts On Air. Further details and a link to the event page are provided upon registration. For this event, we look beyond the achievement gap and into the "experience gap" where too many students are lacking the rich mathematical experiences that lead to deeper mathematical understanding and greater joy in the learning process. In a STEM-focused world, students of all backgrounds need these experiences to see themselves as capable mathematical thinkers and problem solvers. Find out about how a new MathMINDs movement is bringing hands-on mathematical experiences to families and communities, through activities including the National K-12 Game-a-thon and Math Fair. Game-based learning is now widely used in classrooms to engage students while fostering deeper learning that meets educational goals. See how this power can be multiplied when students build their own math games - taking ownership of their learning experiences, honing their social skills, and using collaborative learning techniques.
STEM Innovation Task Force (SITF) Releases White Paper: Focus on Employability Skills for STEM Workers Points to Experiential Learning
 The STEM Innovation Task Force (SITF), an initiative of STEMconnector® comprised of over 30 cross-sector leaders working on collaborative approaches to address the STEM talent pipeline, released a white paper at the tri-annual STEM Councils meeting on July 22nd which details the importance of employability skills for STEM careers and identifies Career-Focused Experiential Learning (CFEL) as the best way for students to obtain these skills. The white paper, entitled Focus on Employability Skills for STEM Workers Points to Experiential Learning, builds off of the SITFs previous white paper STEM 2.0-An Imperative for Our Future Workforce, which outlined four Capability Platforms (CPs) or skill sets that the SITF identified as being critical for STEM professionals to master in order to succeed in tomorrows economy. Employability Skills 2.0 was foremost among these CPs. Through academic review, expert interviews, and roundtable discussions, the SITF defined employability skills as the behaviors above and beyond technical skills that enable STEM employees to create stakeholder momentum to commercialize ideas.
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