ScienceDaily (Jan. 29, 2010) — The nation is hoping for a bright future. Many believe the key to strengthening the U.S. economy and competing globally lies in fostering an innovative culture and educating America’s youth in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). According to this year’s Lemelson-MIT Invention Index , an annual survey that [...]

President Obama used the State of the Union to tout his national competition to improve schools and said he would work with Congress to expand the program to all 50 states. He urged the Senate to follow the House and pass a bill making college education more affordable.
From the prepared text:
This year, we have broken [...]

A new study by Purdue University has shed some light on how to most effectively engage students in technology and engineering at a young age.
The study took five classes of 8th graders in a rural Indiana school and taught them about human impacts on water and water quality through a traditional textbook and lecture method and [...]

Building on President Barack Obama’s Educate to Innovate campaign, The Motorola Foundation- the charitable arm of Motorola – said that it will increase its 2010 giving to U.S. science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education programs through its signature Innovation Generation grants program.
The Motorola Foundation’s Innovation Generation program will get a $7.5 million bump in [...]

Tech wizards at UC Berkeley’s Department of Electrical Engineering are developing mini-robots to help locate earthquake survivors easily, cheaply, and quickly … and without jeopardizing the lives of rescuers.
The robot is known as Dash. It’s made of cardboard, plastic, and parts of computers and bits of old toys, and it’s operated by remote control.
The goal [...]

Reporting from Washington – President Obama, delivering a schoolhouse pitch for a $1.35-billion expansion of his signature education plan, promised Tuesday to “raise the bar” on what is expected of public school teachers and students.
“Nothing will make as much of a difference as the way we educate our sons and daughters,” Obama said after meeting [...]

Drexel University engineering student Jeffrey Dowgala says real-time information recorded by electronic sensors has helped him and his classmates understand the many environmental factors that can affect a bridge—an impact impossible to explore in standard textbooks.
Philadelphia-based Drexel and prominent engineering programs at Northeastern University in Boston, Purdue University, and Texas A&M University secured $200,000 from [...]

Participation in Head Start has positive effects on children’s learning while they are in the program, but most of the advantage they gain disappears by the end of 1st grade, a federal impact study of Head Start programs says.
A large-scale randomized control study of nearly 5,000 children released by the U.S. Department of Health and [...]

A new site for educators, TeacherTube, takes the sharing, production, and community-building aspects of YouTube and offers an educator’s version. According to TeacherTube’s founders, “We seek to fill a need for a more educationally focused, safe venue for teachers, schools, and home learners.”
To read more about TeacherTube, please visit Edutopia.org
Also, check out pcsedu on TeacherTube for [...]

For those of you who are having a hard time figuring out what to buy your robot for Christmas I have one suggestion: Legos. Yaskawa Industries has put on some impressive demonstrations with its Motoman SD10 model (it’s one of our top bots of 2009),  so it was no surprise that the newest SDA5D debuted at IREX 2009 [...]