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

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

AUSTIN–National Instruments is celebrating 35 years as an innovative, growing electronics company, so what better place to hold another innovation panel? More design resources This time, NI folks brought their own innovation to these panels by inviting employees to attend. We crammed 60 into a room and then arrayed four NI folks before them to tackle issues as broad as

DALLAS–Role models play an enormous role in inspiring young men and women to enter their professions. It's all the more crucial for young women to find role models because, even today, there are so few in electrical engineering. More design resources Christina Richards found hers in a round-about way, and today she's starting the pay-back process. Richards is vice president

QUITMAN, Ga.–Don Morgan's wife tears up when she talks about the kids in this southern Georgia hamlet. Textile manufacturing vanished a few years ago after NAFTA went into effect. There are some jobs but there's also meth, and a lot of kids, she says, fall through the cracks. But there's hope. And then there's her husband. Don Morgan's on his

(Odometer: 7,880 miles) NATICK, Mass.–Is the shift toward integrated curriculum and giving students hands-on build-your-own experiences a flash in the pan or is it crucial to building engineers? It's definitely the latter, according to Tom Gaudette, principal academic evangelist at Mathworks here. More design resources "People used to say–the guidance counselor in high school would say–'You're good at math; you should be

MARLTON, N.J.–Education is broken. Innovation is learned. Too many technologists are risk-averse. These were the top-line thoughts that emerged from our hour-long innovation panel this fall at Avnet's branch offices, here, outside Philadelphia. We brought together a number of business leaders, mostly from electronics, to talk about the challenges they face in trying to innovate in the current environment, with