STEM clubs are sprouting up in schools across the nation, cultivating curiosity about STEM subjects and building a pipeline of much needed future professionals. These clubs appeal to a wide array of students and are a great way to develop teamwork, leadership, and other life skills.

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Tags: Informal Learning, STEM education, STEM subjects

There aren’t too many high schoolers who carry out a chemistry experiment that might save lives. Samantha Piszkiewicz and Nicolai Doreng-Stearns, however, did just that. Leading a five-student team at Laguna Beach High School in California, they developed a synthetic antivenom for the treatment of poisonous snakebites.

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Tags: Biomedical Engineering, Chemical Engineering, Chemistry, Nanotechnology

Want to offer your students a hands-on science experience, but lack access to a well-equipped lab? Try a field trip to a science center. Across the country, science centers and museums are working to provide the kind of interactive experiences that enliven classroom learning.

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Tags: Internet Resources, Museums, Science museum, Web Resources

From helping impoverished trash workers in Argentina to transforming the way Canadian engineering students learn, Caroline Baillie has been a tireless champion of fostering social justice through engineering, challenging her colleagues and students to make ethics a core concern in their work.

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Tags: Recycling, Research on Learning, Trash

Amy Smith teaches mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is the driving force behind the Development Design Summit, which in 2009 hosted hosted more than 70 innovators, from Zambian health care workers to Caltech engineering students, for five weeks in Ghana. Her work encompasses 100 scattered projects in the pursuit of a single goal: using simple technology to lessen the burden of the rural poor. “I believe that there is a need for us to focus on solving the world’s most difficult problems,” she argues – problems that affect “the billions of people who don’t have safe water, sanitation, and enough food to eat.”

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Tags: Humanitarian efforts

College student contestants in the UNESCO-Daimler Mondialogo competition strive to design functional, environmentally friendly solutions to pressing problems in some of the world’s poorest regions. The contest pairs teams of college students from prosperous nations, such as the United States, with students from the developing world. They work on projects — from better sewage disposal in an urban slum to bringing modern diagnostic techniques to rural clinics — keyed to the United Nations’ Millenium Development Goals. A story from Prism magazine, April 2009.

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If all burning of fossil fuels were to cease tomorrow, the build-up of greenhouse gases in the Earth’s atmosphere is still severe enough that in 2100, we are still looking at a world at least several degrees warmer than during the pre-industrial era. That warming brings with it certain hazards – droughts, the spread of infectious diseases, the extinction of species. One hazard in particular will require an engineering response: the rise of sea levels.

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Tags: Climate Change, Marine engineering, Ocean, Water management, Water Resources

The ocean’s awesome power is never more apparent when the surf’s up or a coastal storm is brewing. But did you know that engineers are busily seeking ways to harness that might as a means for producing alternative sources of energy? Here is an overview of three different projects, compiled from recent news items in ASEE’s Prism magazine.

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Tags: Marine engineering, Ocean

Most National Laboratories offer some form of educational outreach, including workshops, lectures and tours, and make materials available to teachers nationwide via the Web. But, several labs have hit the road in order to bring free science and engineering education directly to nearby schools.

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Tags: Laboratory Experience, Lecture Series, Museums, National Lab Day, National Laboratories, Plasma Physics