For the 2007 awards, 99 middle school and high school math and science teachers are receiving this recognition. In the citation from the president, winners are commended “for embodying excellence in teaching, for devotion to the learning needs of the students, and for upholding the high standards that exemplify American education at its finest.”

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.

More than 2,200 middle and high schools use engineering courses offered by Project Lead the Way, a Clifton Park, N.Y., nonprofit that receives industry support, up from just 12 when the initiative started in 1997. And Infinity Project, developed out of Southern Methodist University in Dallas, is now in 300 schools, up from 12 in 1999. The impact of these initiatives on the ranks of engineers remains to be seen.

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.
…
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.

Mitch Lown and Dave Arndt teach technology education to students at Bangor High School and West Salem High School. A few of the courses they teach were once, years ago, called “shop class,” but the curriculum is far more advanced today. Not only are these not your father’s shop classes, they aren’t shop classes at all.

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.
…
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.”

The first women’s college to offer an engineering degree, Smith is forging new paths in a field that’s eager to swell its ranks in the United States. Women receive only 20 percent of bachelor’s degrees in engineering, according to a new report by the National Science Board (NSB). Like a handful of other liberal arts colleges, Smith is producing graduates who’ve had a different type of engineering education – one that goes beyond technical training to focus on a broader context for finding solutions to humanity’s problems; one that emphasizes ethics and communication; one so flexible that about half the students study abroad, which is rare, despite the multinational nature of many engineering jobs.
…
Smith’s program boasts a 90 percent retention rate and high participation of underrepresented minorities. Ms. Moriarty hopes to find out which elements of the experience at Smith most contribute to students’ success. Female role models play a part (6 out of 10 engineering faculty here are women), but she says other factors are likely to be more important: “I think the methods being used here could probably translate very easily to other institutions that aren’t all women,” she says.

Changes in the global environment require changes in engineering education. Markets, companies, and supply chains have become much more international and engineering services are often sourced to the countries that can provide the best value. Basic engineering skills (such as knowledge of the engineering fundamentals) have become commodities that can be provided by lower cost engineers in many countries, and some engineering jobs traditionally done in the U.S. are increasingly done overseas. To respond to this changing context, U.S. engineers need new skill sets not easily replicated by low-wage overseas engineers.
…
Society at large does not have an accurate perception of the nature of engineering. Survey data indicate that the public associates engineers with economic growth and defense, but less so with improving health, the quality of life, and the environment.
…
The third challenge for engineering education is to retain those students who are initially attracted to engineering. Attrition is substantial in engineering, particularly in the first year of college. About 60 percent of students who enter engineering majors obtain a degree within 6 years. Although this retention rate is comparable to some other fields, it is especially critical for engineering to retain the pool of entering students.

Emily Conner said she likes to spent free time on the Internet at home, learning about nanotechnology and specifically, nanomedicine.

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.

Q: This is your concept of minimally invasive education?

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.

Mitra simply left the computer on, connected to the Internet, and allowed any passerby to play with it. He monitored activity on the PC using a remote computer and a video camera mounted in a nearby tree.

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.

Engineering is the endeavor that creates, maintains, develops, and applies technology for societies’ needs and desires.
…
One of the first distinctions that must be made is between science and engineering.
…
Science is the study of what is and engineering is the creation of can be.

Since 1979, the proportion of scientifically literate adults has doubled—to a paltry 17%. The rest are not savvy enough to understand the science section of The New York Times or other science media pitched at a similar level. As disgracefully low as the rate of adult scientific literacy in the United States may be, Miller found even lower rates in Canada, Europe, and Japan—a result he attributes primarily to lower university enrollments.

Massachusetts was the first state in the nation to include Engineering as a topic in its Learning Standards.

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.

Founded with more than US $460 million from the F.W. Olin Foundation, the school, which will graduate its first class at the end of this month, was conceived as perhaps the most ambitious experiment in engineering education in the past several decades. Olin’s aim is to flip over the traditional “theory first, practice later” model and make students plunge into hands-on engineering projects starting on day one. Instead of theory-heavy lectures, segregated disciplines, and individual efforts, Olin champions design exercises, interdisciplinary studies, and teamwork.

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.

To a visitor, the school resembles any other small college. What’s different about it is its almost messianic mission: to change the way engineers are educated in the U.S. so that they can help the U.S. compete in a global economy with lots of smart, ambitious engineers in China, India and elsewhere. “If they become another good engineering school, they will have failed,” says Woodie Flowers, an MIT professor advising Olin. “The issue is to do it differently enough and to do it in way that will be exportable” to other colleges.

as Paul S. Peercy, dean of engineering at the University of Wisconsin and chair of the Engineering Dean’s Council at the American Society for Engineering Education put it: “I used to say, ‘look around, everything except the plants are engineered.’ Now I say, ‘look around, everything and some of the plants are engineered.’”

President Lawrence H. Summers. “It marks our recognition of the profound importance of technology and applied sciences for every aspect of our society. It makes visible our commitment to major new resources and faculty positions in this vital area, and our dedication to educating a new generation of technologically-literate students.

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.

Dr. Carl Wieman, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2001, discusses the failures of traditional educational practices, even as used by “very good” teachers, and the successes of some new practices and technology that characterize this more effective approach. Research on how people learn science is now revealing how many teachers badly misinterpret what students are thinking and learning from traditional science classes and exams.

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.