Congressional App Challenge
Posted on July 22nd, 2019 by Mary Lord
Middle and high school students nationwide create apps for desktop PCs, mobile devices, or other platforms in this annual Congressional initiative aimed at engaging America’s youth in computer science and STEM.
Filed under: Grades 6-8, Grades 9-12, K-12 Outreach Programs, Special Features | Comments Off on Congressional App Challenge
Tags: coding, Competitions for Students, Computer Science, Congressional app challenge, Contest, U.S. Congress
Growing up in St. Paul, Minn., Abigail Harrison dreamed of becoming the first woman to land on Mars. Unlike most aspiring space explorers, however, she pursued her passion. Now 21, Astronaut Abby – the social media presence she created at age 14 to do research for a history project on the International Space Station – has become an influential advocate for STEM education through her speeches, blog, and Twitter posts. 
If you were an engineer or scientist, what would you wear to work? That’s the fascinating focus of Scientists Get Dressed, a new STEM-themed children’s book by award-winning author Deborah Lee Rose. The book, available this fall, includes an NGSS-aligned STEM activity called the Scientists’ Glove Challenge. 
Students in grades 6 to 8 use water balloons and string to understand how the force of gravity between two objects and the velocity of a spacecraft can balance to form an orbit. They see that when the velocity becomes too great for gravity to hold the spacecraft in orbit, the object escapes the orbit and travels further away from the planet.
ASEE’s Pre-College Engineering Education Division (PCEE) has a new grant program for PreK-12 teachers who seek support for the implementation of an engineering project in their classroom in the 2019-2020 academic year. Teachers must be affiliated with the division. Applications due July 1, 2019.
Basic research is often invisible, though its results show up in game-changing technologies from MRIs to mobile devices to safer aircraft. To help Americans understand their oversize return on investment, the National Science Foundation has created a short video, “Your World: Brought to You by NSF,” and website depicting some of the many fruits of the lab that have roots in NSF funding. 
Competitions – whether an in-class design challenge or national science fair – can inspire students to pursue STEM. But problem-based learning also can energize and even change teachers, says Owensville (Missouri) High School science teacher Kevin Lay, whose students won top honors and $100,000 at the 2019 Samsung Solve for Tomorrow contest. 
Students in grades 4 to 9 learn about projectile motion by designing, building, and testing a machine that can kick a Ping-Pong ball into a cup lying on its side 12 inches away.
Pre-service and in-service middle school science teachers are sought for a graduate research project aimed at developing an assessment instrument to improve the teaching of engineering practices and incorporation of design in science classrooms, as outlined in the Next Generation Science Standards and other state science-education reforms. 
