Gwen Mueller is an IT Professional, #dnd Gamer-girl, #coffee drinker, geek in Secondary Education, editor on tumblr #education, curating #science, and #tech resources to inspire lifelong learning with 1/4 cup of #fun.
Showing 67 posts tagged engineering
wut4 asks:
I wonder… What discourages kids from studying math and science and keeps them from pursuing STEM careers?
Anyone with personal experience to share? Maybe you always found science interesting but decided to choose something else as a career path? Why?
The good news is that teachers can play a huge role in helping to decrease the STEM gender gap. Erik Robelen, writing in Education Week last year , noted, “Long before women pick a college major or enter the workforce, their K-12 education sets the stage in level of interest, confidence, and achievement in STEM.” More recently, Forbes suggested reworking K-12 curriculum to cultivate interest in science and technology early and to encourage girls by offering more hands-on workshops and bringing female engineers to talk to students. What can teachers do? Some ideas pulled from the on-going discussion…
Many of the suggestion center around awareness, that girls can’t aspire to what they don’t know and aren’t introduced to. How have you tried to close the STEM gender gap?
“For years, you’ve heard about the importance of a college education and were told that any job worth having required one. You heard that higher education was scarce, and a degree in any subject would set you apart from the competition. And, once upon a time, it was true—but in 2013, it’s not.
The current employment crisis is only partly due to the recession. Another part of the problem is that there are fewer and fewer science, mathematics and engineering graduates and more and more art, psychology and communication graduates. Since we are in the midst of the technology revolution, those numbers should be reversed.
A recent study from Georgetown University showed that liberal arts degrees were accompanied by low wages—for the duration of the employee’s career. A college graduate with a bachelor’s degree in art earns about the same salary as a community college graduate. That means those last two years at a four-year school have no value on the job market.”
Ouch.
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Take a look at this Hall of Fame for women in tech, science, engineering and math, created by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
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Despite Efforts to Close Gender Gaps, Some Disciplines Remain Lopsided
Engineering and teaching are among the most lopsided disciplines in academe’s gender split. In 2010, women received 80 percent of the undergraduate degrees awarded in education, the U.S. Education Department reports. And they earned 77 percent of the master’s and 67 percent of the doctoral degrees in that field.
In engineering, by contrast, women earned just 18 percent of undergraduate, 22 percent of master’s, and 23 percent of doctoral degrees.
Nationally, women are heading to college in record numbers and now make up 57 percent of undergraduates. Women also earn 60 percent of all master’s and 52 percent of all doctoral degrees, according to U.S. Education Department statistics, which include doctorates earned in professional fields like medicine and dentistry. But for all the efforts colleges are making to diversify their departments, some fields of study remain stubbornly single sex.
Can an ‘X Factor for Tech’ Get Kids Excited About STEM?
How do we turn science, technology, engineering, and math geeks into the rock stars of the 21st century? Given high demand for a STEM-proficient workforce, figuring out how to inspire student interest in those fields is a nut that pop star Will.i.am is doing his best to crack. He’s plunking down his own cash for a STEM TV special, composing the first song to be beamed from Mars, and plugging STEM on the heels of the political conventions. His latest idea: harnessing the nation’s obsession with reality television by teaming up with Simon Cowell to create an X-Factor show for STEM.
photo via flickr:CC | West Point Public Affairs
3-D Printers Spread From Engineering Departments to Designs Across Disciplines
Colleges and universities are finding more and more uses for 3-D-printing technology, which has grown in sophistication and fallen in price in recent years. Some proponents argue that nearly every discipline could benefit from the ability to easily create objects from customized designs. “We want this for humanities, for social sciences, for bio people, for law school, so what’s interesting about 3-D printing is that it touches on all these areas,” says Hod Lipson, a professor of mechanical engineering and of computing and information science at Cornell University, who is creating a 3-D-printing course for nonengineers.
photo via flickr:CC | freelancing god
“Our study shows that a service-learning method is significantly more effective in influencing introductory engineering students’ interests, recognition of relevance and satisfaction in learning.”
Parents Are an ‘Untapped Resource’ to Push STEM, Study Says
“Parents are an untapped resource for promoting STEM motivation, and the results of our study demonstrate that a modest intervention aimed at parents can produce significant changes in their children’s academic choices,” researchers write in an article published this month in the journal Psychological Science
photo via flickr:CC | BuckDaddy
Here’s the list, read the article fore more details:
Kam Gan, a Chinese immigrant living in San Francisco, may not have ever thought it possible to go into engineering as a career. But an after school program in robotics has inspired her to envision an education — and eventually a job — in this male-dominated field.
Concern remains widespread about the relative lack of women pursuing advanced study and careers in STEM fields. Recent federal data show just one-quarter of people working in those fields are women; one in seven engineers is female. Also, women trailed men in earning doctorates in many STEM fields, as of 2009, including computer science, engineering, chemistry, and math.
“What we see is that even for girls that are achieving, they’re not translating their academic success into career selection. If we can’t get half of the population engaged in the STEM enterprise, we are in trouble.”
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Inside Etsy’s Gambit to Hire More Female Engineers
When Marc Hedlund joined Etsy last fall to lead engineering, he was confronted by a woeful gender ratio on his new team. Just three people on the 100-person engineering and operations staff were women.
In April, Hedlund — who previously founded the failed personal finance start-up Wesabe – advertised $5,000 in grants for women to attend a three-month program to turn people with a passion for programming into professional engineers. It’s called Hacker School, and it takes place in New York this summer. He also volunteered to host the session at Etsy’s Brooklyn office.
via Mr Loucks
Coolest jobs in tech: decoding life, touring solar systems
Managing hardware and storage needs; building custom, in-house applications; making information accessible via the Web—such tasks are the mainstays of IT work, so mundane that they’re generally not worth talking about.
photo via flickr:CC | bandarji
“When you remove the fear of failure, impossible things suddenly become possible.”
“What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?” asks Regina Dugan, then director of DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. In this breathtaking talk she describes some of the extraordinary projects — a robotic hummingbird, a prosthetic arm controlled by thought, and, well, the internet — that her agency has created by not worrying that they might fail.
