By Brian Fuller We asked a lot of questions on our drive around the U.S. about how we’re enabling the next generation of innovation, the new engineering classes. We found many STEM challenges but a lot of inspiration, from Don Morgan — a one-man Army of inspiration in the Georgia public school system — to engineer Christina Richards in Texas

By Jennifer Delony You’ve seen the highlights here on the Drive for Innovation; programs across the U.S. are beginning to deliver more resources and funding to help students thrive in technology studies and deliver on an innovative future. We met Don Morgan of Brooks County High School, who strives to build an engineering program in an agriculture town, and we made

Innovation Generation, until earlier in 2012, was a spiritual cousin of  Drive for Innovation. Until the site lost sponsorship, it functioned as a place for middle-school, high-school, and early college students, teachers, parents, and mentors, promoting  STEM learning with contests and competitions as well as videos, articles, and tutorials.    Just before the site ended its run, we had a

SAVANNAH, Ga.–Sitting in front of me are 150 people who hold our future in their hands. They’re teachers from the Georgia Engineering Teachers Education (GETEA) association, and they have asked me to speak at their annual conference here about the Drive for Innovation. I want to hear from them as much as they want to hear from me what’s going

Maybe not, according to David Peins, who teaches children as young as eight years old to read schematics, create working circuits on breadboards, and do other fun techie stuff.  Writing in EE Times this week, Peins argues:   "Most engineers are not good at introducing the basic concepts, anxious to skip to the beauty of the elegant solution, so there is

MESA, Ariz.–When you were a kid (if you're of a certain age), you might have found yourself under a shade tree on summer days, bent into the engine compartment of a muscle car and watching a sage expert wrench down new and improved parts of his engine. That's how you were inspired; that's how you learned. More design resources Jim

WASHINGTON–Ken Connor has seen a few engineers pass before him in his decades of teaching engineering at Renssaeler Polytechnic Institute (RPI), so I thought he'd make an interesting sounding board when we met here during the recent USA Science and Engineering Festival. More design resources He was an interesting sounding board, but not for the reason I anticipated. One of

DALLAS–Semiconductor and sensor technology used for years to guide precision bombs and cruise missiles is making its way into the hands of teachers–for peaceful purposes. More design resources Penveu, a mobile wireless technology from a unit of Interphase here, this week announced its first product, intending to disrupt the $1.8 billion interactive white board market. The handheld penveu is a

A year ago, Steve Wozniak, Apple co-founder and now chief scientist at Fusion-io, 'fessed up to a little secret: For years he'd been secretly teaching at a local middle school. Can you not only imagine a billionaire genius doing something like that but how fantastic he'd be as a teacher? More design resources He made the point during our fireside