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Top Science and Math Teachers Receive Presidential Award
Each winner receives a $10,000 award from NSF, as well as a trip for two to Washington, D.C., for a week of celebratory events and professional development activities.
Among the activities during that week are a day with scientists and science educators at NSF; meetings with members of Congress and federal agency leadership; and a reception and dinner at the U.S. Department of State featuring guest speaker Dorothy Metcalf-Lindenburger, a NASA Astronaut-Mission Specialist.
Related: Presidential Award for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching - Einstein Fellowship for Teachers - NSF Graduate Teaching Fellows in K-12 Education - The Importance of Science Education - Education Resources Directory for Science and Engineering
Reading, Writing … And Engineering
Besides creating curricular approaches, groups are lobbying state governments to add engineering to their education standards.
Massachusetts included engineering content in its state science requirements for grades K-12 starting in 2001. New Hampshire began sprinkling engineering and technology concepts into its science curriculum starting last school year. New Jersey incorporated engineering concepts into its state education standards starting in 2004. And more states are following: Texas is working on creating standards for an engineering course that can be used to fulfill a high-school science credit.
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Teaching through problem-solving storybooks that feature characters from around the globe “becomes a lot richer and is liberating for many kids and many teachers,” she says. The curriculum can cost as little as $40 — the price of a teacher’s binder, including lesson plans and one storybook. For about $6,000, a school could furnish materials, refills and a storybook for each student in every grade.
Related: resource directory for teachers - k-12 Engineering Education (project lead the way) - k-12 Engineering Education - Lego Learning - Economic Benefits of Investing in Science Education - Engineering Activities: for 9-12 Year Olds - Yale Cultivates Young Engineers - Playing Dice and Children’s Numeracy - Engineering Education Advocate - National Underwater Robotics Challenge
Computer programs, 3-D designs, architectural drawing, engineering, mass production and the design and marketing of products are only some of the areas local high school students are tackling in Lown and Arndt’s classes.
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In their manufacturing classes, both Lown and Arndt give students a feel for what it’s like to set up a business and produce and sell a product. And they do make a profit. Lown’s students, for example, built and sold mounting kits for deer antlers and made a profit on the venture. Arndt said he always stays conscious of the world that students will face after graduation.
“I address every class as if it’s a job,” he said. “We’re not here to waste time because that’s not the way it’s going to be when they get in the job market. The biggest challenge for me is changing the attitudes of some students and instilling a work ethic. If they say they are going to do something, they need to follow through on that.”
Related: Educational Institutions Economic Impact - Middle School Engineers - Inspire Students to Study Math and Science - Computer Game and Real World Education - Kids in the Lab: Getting High-Schoolers Hooked on Science
My comments on: National Association of High School Principals Takes Exception to Two Million Minutes
Thanks for saying what has to be said. I have talked on similar themes on my blog for awhile now. The USA is definitely losing its relative position as the clear leader for science and engineering excellence.
The debate now whether we are willing to invest more today to slow the decline or whether we are willing to risk the economic future where our centers of science and engineering excellence are eclipsed quickly.
There is a long lag time that has allowed us to coast for the last 30 or so years. The reality is that most Americans suffer under the illusion we are in the same position we were in 1970’s. We are not and it is obvious to me that the economic impacts are starting to have dramatic effects now and it will only increase.
It might be more pleasant to explain why the USA is fine the way it is but that is a mistake. For more on my thoughts see two categories of the Curious Cat Science and Engineering Blog: Economics and primary science education and 2 posts: The Future is Engineering and the Political Impact of Global Technology Excellence.
How to Re-engineer an engineering major at a women’s college:
Related: Smith’s engineering education efforts - Engineering Education Study Debate - A New Engineering Education - The Future is Engineering
Moving Forward to Improve Engineering Education a report from the National Science Board:
Related: NAE Report on Educating the Engineer of 2020 - Engineering Education Study Debate - Educating Engineers for 2020 and Beyond by Charles Vest - The Future is Bright with Engineering and Entrepreneurism - Global Engineering Education Study - USA Under-counting Engineering Graduates - Leah Jamieson on the Future of Engineering Education - Improving Engineering Education the Olin Way
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I recently wrote about evolution and scientific literacy. The graph on the left shows the percentage of the population that understands evolution is a core scientific principle. The graph based on data from 2005 for 34 countries.
Blue indicates those that know that “human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals.” Evolution Less Accepted in U.S. Than Other Western Countries, Study Finds, from National Geographic News: A study of several such surveys taken since 1985 has found that the United States ranks next to last in acceptance of evolution theory among nations polled. Researchers point out that the number of Americans who are uncertain about the theory’s validity has increased over the past 20 years.
The United States is is second to last place in this question of scientific literacy with only 40% of the population knowing the truth. The USA was between Cyprus and Turkey in this measure of understanding of scientific knowledge. The most knowledgeable countries have about twice the rate of knowledgeable respondents (with nearly 80% knowing). Related: Scientific Illiteracy by Country (the USA managed to stay in the top 10 for overall scientific literacy rate of 8th graders in 2003) - Understanding Evolution (University of California at Berkeley) - Scientifically Illiteracy - Retroviruses - DNA Repair Army - Massive Project Will Reveal How Humans Continue to Evolve - Gene Study Finds Cannibal Pattern - Nigersaurus - Rare Chinese Mountain Cat |

Building minds by building robots:
The small video devices that can be attached to tubes and inserted through natural body openings for medical exploratories and procedures sound pretty high tech.
But through nanomedicine, “people could swallow a ‘pillcam’ and would’ have to use wires,” said Emily.
That’s pretty heavy duty stuff for a J.D. Lever Elementary School fifth-grader. Emily and her classmates are getting ready for a regional FIRST LEGO League competition at the James Taylor Center on the Aiken High school campus Saturday. Eleven teams from Aiken and other areas are expected to participate, with the top performers going on to a state contest in January.
Related: Lego Learning - Fun k-12 Science and Engineering Learning - FIRST Robotics Competition - nanotechnology posts
This is a fascinating interview discussing what children can learn if given a computer and little, if any, instruction. Very Cool. Links on the progress since this interview are at the end of the post.
A: Yes. It started out as a joke but I’ve kept using the term … This is a system of education where you assume that children know how to put two and two together on their own. So you stand aside and intervene only if you see them going in a direction that might lead into a blind alley.
The interview explores what happened when:
What he discovered was that the most avid users of the machine were ghetto kids aged 6 to 12, most of whom have only the most rudimentary education and little knowledge of English. Yet within days, the kids had taught themselves to draw on the computer and to browse the Net. Some of the other things they learned, Mitra says, astonished him.
Watch a video of Richard Baraniuk (Rice University professor speaking at TED) discussing Connexions: an open-access education publishing system. The content available through Connexions includes short content modules such as:
and: Protein Folding, as well as full courses, such as: Fundamentals of Electrical Engineering I and Physics for K-12.
Related: Google technical talk webcasts (including a presentation by Richard Baraniuk at Google) - podcasts of Technical Talks at Google - science podcast posts - Berkeley and MIT courses online
The NASA Robotics Academy is an intensive resident summer program of higher learning for college undergraduate and graduate students interested in pursuing professional and leadership careers in robotics-related fields.
Besides attending lectures and workshops with experts in their field, the Robotics Academy students are involved in supervised research in GSFC laboratories, private companies, and universities, and will participate in visits to other NASA Centers, the Applied Physics Laboratory, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a number of robotics-related academic laboratories and industries.
Projects this year include: Conformal Gripping System for Space Robots and Cooperative Team-diagnosis in Multi-robot Systems
Scientific Illiteracy and the Partisan Takeover of Biology by Liza Gross, Public Library of Science:
While the 17% figure does not amaze me I am surprised that the scientific literacy has doubled since 1979.
A comparison of science education achievement: International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (TIMSS), Average science scale scores of eighth-grade students, by country (2003), top 13 shown below:
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Presentation by Ioannis Miaoulis, President and Director of the Museum of Science, Boston on k-12 Engineering Education.
Public schools from pre-kindergarten to high school are now including engineering as a new discipline. Dr. Miaoulis describes the value of including Engineering in the formal curriculum content for elementary, middle school and high school level. He also discusses the necessary partnerships between the state Department of Education, federal government, school districts, teacher groups, colleges, universities and museums and industry that are supporting this effort and the evolution of the program.
Excellent article: The Olin Experiment by Erico Guizzo:
And if the curriculum is innovative, the school itself is hardly a traditional place: it doesn’t have separate academic departments, professors don’t get tenured, and students don’t pay tuition - every one of them gets a $130 000 scholarship for the four years of study.
Find out more about the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering.
Building a Better Engineer by David Wessel:
We share more thoughts on Olin’s efforts to improve engineering education on our other blog.
Harvard is planing to move engineering education to the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences within the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (via Engineering is Becoming a Liberal Art).
The Technology Mosaic by David Epstein:
From Harvard’s announcement:
In order to provide adequate coverage of modern engineering and applied science for students and to be in the vanguard of emerging research areas, the school plans to increase the university’s engineering and applied sciences faculty by about 50 percent in the coming years.

Science Education in the 21st Century: Using the Tools of Science to Teach Science podcast by Dr. Carl Wieman, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2001. Also received the first NSF Distinguished teaching Scholars award (NSF’s “highest honor for excellence in both teaching and research”) and the National Professor Of The Year (CASE and Carnegie Foundation).
However, research is also providing insights on how to do much better. The combination of this research with modern information technology is setting the stage for a new more effective approach to science education based on using the tools of science. This can provide a relevant and effective science education to all students.
Podcast recording 21 Nov 2005 at the University of British Columbia.
Text of March 15, 2006 Dr. Wieman testimony to the US House of Representatives Science Committee.
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