Bench Talk

Camsie McAdams at Discovery Education describes her unique approaches to developing and scaling up opportunities for all students to explore and pursue STEM, such as organizing local excursions, creating accessible digital content, and connecting students to STEM professionals.

With the hope of addressing a lack of talent and diversity across the technology sector, Françoise Chombar advocated for and helped implement an integrated STEM model, innovative STEM academies, and Saturday schools to increase STEM interest among Belgian schoolchildren—especially girls.

The Mansfield Independent School District exemplifies the value of project-based learning through its STEM academies. With assistance from community partners like Mouser Electronics, these STEM academies give students a competitive advantage as they pursue further education and employment.

Bridging the gap between desktop programming and embedded development does not need to be complicated. CircuitPython is an exciting new programming language that targets the education market to help foster the learning of both computer programming and electronics.

When it comes to making a Maker, education, mentoring, and big ideas are key. Projects become about the journey of problem solving, and big ideas.

What is that in-between place between boring and floundering? It’s that place where you feel challenged, but not overwhelmed. For me Modern Physics is that place. I enjoy going to class. I like reading the material and doing the homework. I find myself thinking about the math and therefore thinking about physics in general.

I never thought that I would be sitting in on an EE class, years after graduating, taught by a Professor Emeritus at Rice University. I snuck in at the tail end of the course when he was in the middle of discussing op amps. I feel so guilty; I haven’t paid the university a dime, but I am excited to be here. I settle in and listen for a while. No one asks any questions; I assume they are all busy taking notes. Then I sped up time a bit so things would go 25% faster, since I had seen most of this before. It’s handy, but you have to have a MOOC to do that.

The first robots I recall ever interacting with when I was young were Transformers. I suppose, if you were being REALLY generous, you could refer to them as semi-educational toys since each was a mini-puzzle that only kids younger than 13 could figure out. In fact, if I were this clever at 8-years-old, I might have convinced my parents to want to buy me more. But then, all I would have to show for it would be a box full of forgotten plastic robots that transformed into cars I could now sell on eBay. But there was a different group of transforming robots that I wish I had discovered in my high school days. Instead of buying them, you built them with a group of your peers. Instead of transforming into cars, they would transform your life.

When I was in college, I held 3 part time jobs, of which one of them was tutoring Physics. Not that I was an expert or anything, but someone had to do it. Most of the time I spent the tutoring hours working on my own assignments. All of it is just a blur now, except one person, a nun. She was determined to make a passing grade, and she started coming in about a third of the way through the semester. I quickly figured out that algebra is kind of important to physical laws like F=mA. It seemed so simple to me, so intuitive, so I started out rattling off what force was, mass, and how acceleration played a part. The glazed look in her eyes told me I needed to step back a bit. So we began exploring the mathematical relationship.