STEM Education models and innovations with Gaming

“Work has become distributed, discontinuous, and decentralized, hence, 3D”, says Stowe. As hyperlinks subvert hierarchy, so does work fragmentation subvert organizations. Given the nature of 3D work, it may be possible that we are witnessing the end of the corporation as a wealth-generation machine, just as its current power seems to have no limits.

This post describes how to use Sketchpad to graph a polar function and create a family of polar functions.

Refining Canadian tar-sands oil creates mountains of filthy black waste, as the residents of Detroit are discovering. Other American communities can look forward to the same.

Executive summary

This paper reviews and analyzes the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) labor market and workforce and the supply of high-skill temporary foreign workers, who serve as “guestworkers.” It addresses three central issues in the ongoing discussion about the need for high-skill guestworkers in the United States:

Is there a problem producing enough STEM-educated students at sufficient performance levels to supply the labor market?How large is the flow of guestworkers into the STEM workforce and into the information technology (IT) workforce in particular? And what are the characteristics of these workers?What are the dynamics of the STEM labor market, and what are the employment and wage trends in the IT labor market?

Analysis of these issues provides the basis for assessing the extent of demand for STEM workers and the impact of guestworker flows on the STEM and IT workforces.

 

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Our country is in trouble. That's the key takeaway from Sara Martinez Tucker's experience as the undersecretary in the U.S. Department of Education.

(CNN) -- Kevin Wang always had the teaching bug in him.

After graduating from UC-Berkeley in 2002 with a degree in electrical engineering and computer science, he turned down industry jobs to teach in the Bay Area. A few years later he got a masters degree in education from Harvard and then went to Microsoft to work as a software developer.

But he couldn't stop teaching.

Before he arrived at the office every morning, Wang drove to a nearby high school and taught first-period computer science. He told colleagues and friends about his experience and recruited them to teach in local schools.

The word spread. In 2009 Wang launched Technology Education and Literacy in Schools (TEALS), an initiative that places high-tech professionals as part-time teachers in high schools.

 

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This series of webinars brings together initiatives, experiences, academic understanding and practitioner expertise in the field of digital making. It is supported by Nominet Trust in collaboration with the MacArthur funded Make-to-Learn project.

The purpose in this article is twofold: 1) distinguish “main course” Project Based Learning (PBL) from the short duration and intellectually lightweight activities and projects common to many classrooms; and 2) argue that PBL is an essential tool for preparing students to reach 21st century educational goals and succeed in the 21st century.

Imagine a young athlete arriving at a university with the potential to win big over the next four years. Now imagine this athlete sitting out an entire season while practicing with the team and getting the lay of the land. This strategy is called redshirting, and it has proven to be an effective way to prepare athletes for success.

Now imagine using the same concept for preparing undergraduates for a degree in engineering. It's just one of the creative approaches being taken by institutions that are receiving grants through a public-private partnership called Graduate 10K+--so named because of its goal of stimulating comprehensive action at universities and colleges to help increase the annual number of new graduates in engineering and computer science by 10,000.

 

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Birth of a Black Hole

A new kind of cosmic flash may reveal something never seen before: the birth of a black hole.

When a massive star exhausts its fuel, it collapses under its own gravity and produces a black hole, an object so dense that not even light can escape its gravitational grip. According to a new analysis by an astrophysicist at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), just before the black hole forms, the dying star may generate a distinct burst of light that will allow astronomers to witness the birth of a new black hole for the first time.

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Sometimes astronomy is like real estate -- what's important is location, location, and location. Astronomers have resolved a major problem in their understanding of a class of stars that undergo regular outbursts by accurately measuring the distance to a famous example of the type.

The researchers used the National Science Foundation's Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) and the European VLBI Network (EVN) to precisely locate one of the most-observed variable-star systems in the sky -- a double-star system called SS Cygni -- at 370 light-years from Earth. This new distance measurement meant that an explanation for the system's regular outbursts that applies to similar pairs also applies to SS Cygni.

 

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Join Gary Stager and Sylvia Martinez on Sunday, June 23, 2013 for Invent To Learn @ ISTE 2013, a workshop about making in the classroom. Join colleagues for an energizing day of “hard fun” as we invent, tinker, and “learn learning.” Participants will engage in a variety of projects using modern tools and technology – the perfect way to get ready for ISTE.

The location overlooking the River Walk is easily walkable from hotels near the ISTE conference site.

A delicious Tex-Mex lunch will be served along with continental breakfast and snacks. Makers need their energy!

Each attendee will also receive a copy of the just released book Invent To Learn: Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom (a $34.95 value.)

Date: Sunday, June 23rd 2013 (You will have plenty of time to get to the ISTE opening session)

Time: 9AM – 3PM

Location: The Original Mexican Restaurant (map)
528 River Walk St San Antonio, TX 78205

Price: $85 includes 6 hour workshop, continental breakfast, lunch, snacks and drinks, plus a copy of Invent To Learn – Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom.

Register today – space is limited!

 

Read more about the workshop at http://www.inventtolearn.com/invent-to-learn-iste-2013/

Overview:

A place where imagination is celebrated, dreams are realized, and play is paramount.  No…it’s not an amusement park. It’s Playmaker, the new school model developed by GameDesk and supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to help usher education into the 21st century and transform the way society views learning.

What is TEALS?

TEALS (Technology Education And Literacy in Schools) is a grassroots employee driven program that recruits, mentors, and places high tech professionals who are passionate about digital literacy and computer science education into high school classes as part-time teachers in a team teaching model where the school district is unable to meet their students' Computer Science needs on its own. 

Read about TEALS in NY Times | Geekwire | Harvard Ed School Magazine | UC Berkeley | University of Illinois | ACTE Magazine | 425 Magazine

TEALS videos from YouthSpark (remote teaching in rural KY) | Q13 Fox Seattle | Loudoun County Public Schools |

Bringing together programmers, designers, and educators to develop prototypes for social tools, including apps, badges, and curriculum in pursuit of a better Web.

 

A competition bringing together youth, programmers, designers, and educators to develop prototypes for social tools, including apps, badges, and curriculum in pursuit of a better Web.

Up to $10,000 per award.

The U.S. Department of Education announced the final winners of this year’s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) contract awards—funds that are reserved for entrepreneurial small businesses using cutting-edge R&D to develop commercially viable technologies to solve tough problems.  And there’s something that may surprise you about the winning contracts: More than half—or 12 in all—are for games and game-related projects, more than in any previous year. That says a lot about the increasingly creative field of educational games, and the growing base of evidence indicating that games can be an important and effective component of our strategy to prepare a highly skilled 21st century American workforce.

The SBIR program at the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), the Department of Education’s research division, provides up to $1.05 million to small businesses for the R&D of commercially viable education technology products. The program holds an annual competition and awards funds in several phases: Phase I awards, up to $150,000 for 6 months, allow for the development of a prototype and research to demonstrate its functionality and feasibility; and Phase II awards, up to $900,000 for 2 years, are for full-scale development of the product, iterative research to refine it, and a pilot study to demonstrate its usability, feasibility, and promise. A small number of Fast Track awards are made each year for funds to cover work in both Phase I and Phase II.

 

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Once there was Internet 2 0 Now we have Internet2 It s an entirely new Internet now being built in cyberspace designed to be 1 000 times faster than the traditional Internet Internet2 is being

Could better engagement between tech vendors and schools solve the UK's IT skills crisis? JoVona Taylor reports.