Want to help kids get involved with technology? This short item from EDN magazine describes and IEEE program that might be worth your while…Dan
Want to inspire the next generation of engineers and scientists? For a few hours of your time each month, you can do your part. Once students hit grade 8, apparently half have already lost any interest in STEM subjects.
(source: TryEngineering Together)So…the IEEE has teamed with Cricket Media to create TryEngineering Together, facilitating eMentoring relationships between techies just like you and students in grades 3-5.
My colleague Nicole DiGiose over at sister pub EBN has written about this in much more depth. Go check it out – change a kid’s life.
I wish they’d had this program when I was growing up. When I was a kid we had kits from Edmund Scientific, and Radio Shack, but no real directed effort or any kind of formalized instruction. My experience with things electronic usually ended with letting the smoke out of stuff. Nowdays, Edmund Scientific is a mere shell of it’s former self and their products are two optical kits – one for a periscope, the other for a projector that uses a cardboard box for a housing. As we have discussed before, Radio Shack is becoming a faint memory, and that is what has become of beginner electronic kits and experiment stations like both companies used to sell.
Bravo to the IEEE and Cricket Media for creating this program.
I just realized the other dinosaur in the room I didn’t mention is Heathkit – how could I forget them since they were such a huge source for ham gear in the 1947 through 1992 – they were the first to go out of business but then their kits were rather more complex – and useful. Some folks are still using Heathkit gear today.
My daughter soldered together a Heathkit digital clock, which I got at the tail end of the company back in the early 90’s. She was 10-12 years old at the time. She was interested in Linux early on, because I ran a Linux household server that hosted both Windows and Mac shares. She said she wanted to learn Linux, because “it talks to everything!”
Now, having earned two Bachelors and one Masters degree, she is now finishing up her PhD in Earth Systems and Science.
Her favorite work? Writing and running complex ecological models. Her Masters thesis was on the Black Bear population in the Trans-Pecos area, and used an electronics mesh network program to model the bear population (voltage) in isolated habitats (nodes) and their migration (current) patterns.
It was a novel use of electronic mesh software used to model biological systems.
She proved that if the US built a wall between us and Mexico, cutting off Black Bear migration, that the US population would die off, from lack of introduction of new gene pool members from Mexico.
The Texas DNR tried to suppress publication (they funded the project), but my daughter was allowed to publish, as long as she included the actual results in tabular format in an appendix, and not the main thesis, which had to gloss over the real conclusion to please the political machine.
Her first introduction to politics in science, I’m afraid.