“Don’t you hate it when … ?” Sharon Tomski, who teaches a senior design class at Milwaukee’s Saint Thomas More High School, uses that everyday phrase to inspire her students to invent things. It works.

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Tags: Engineering Design, Project Lead the Way

Few American K-12 students are ever exposed to engineering in school. Legislation that would start to address that imbalance and fund efforts to bolster engineering education in primary and secondary schools was recently introduced in both the Senate and House. It’s called the Engineering Education for Innovation Act.

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Tags: Public Policy

Fifth grade girls at the North Belmont Elementary School in North Carolina are getting a chance to hone their math and science skills with the help of some very special tutors. Each girl is matched with a woman STEM major from nearby Belmont Abbey College, who will act as her mentor.

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Tags: Programs for Girls, STEM subjects

President Obama has proposed a $900 million program aimed at tackling America’s “dropout epidemic.” Efforts planned include identifying, early on, those students at risk of dropping out and helping teachers offer personalized instruction.

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Tags: Public Policy

The growing trend of schools providing laptops to students may be a mistake, a New York University history professor argues. It gives children “too much privacy” and encourage kids to retreat to digital lairs of their own making in their bedrooms, he writes.

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Fourth grade students in Glen Rock, New Jersey’s four elementary schools recently studied adhesive bandages from a product-design point of view — how they were created to meet a need. The students were then challenged to design a technology that would improve their teachers’ lives. One group came up with a scale-model classroom with sliding dividers so teachers could utilize different parts of the room.

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When high school students graduate, they should be ready to enter college or the workforce, but too few will have the skills and knowledge necessary to make those transitions. A recent report commissioned by the National High School Center that found that the problems begin before pupils enter high school. By the eighth grade, most students — especially low-income and minority students — are failing to meet targets intended to make them university- or career-ready by 12th grade.

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Music is the one thing that all students love. But there’s also a big and growing technical element to music that will also likely pique their interest — and possibly give them new career options. That’s why computers and technology have become an important part of music and band classes at Arizona’s Pima School District.

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Tags: Music engineering

To help take the pressure off local libraries, and to further its agenda to give more Americans access to broadband Internet connections, the Federal Communications Commission has OKd a rule change that will allow public schools with government-funded computers to make them available to the general public in off-hours.

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Tags: Computer Engineering, Public Policy