A new $250m grant - California Career Pathways Trust - act now!

California STEM educators in grades kindergarten through grade fourteen, it's time to freshen up those rejected grant requests; the state is finally coming around to seeing it your way : the legislature has set aside a quarter-billion dollars ($250,000,000) to "fund specialists in work-based learning, as defined in Section 51760.1 of the Education code."  

How can we be sure Section 51760.1 is talking about STEM ed?  Well, here are the first few lines of that section:

For purposes of this section, "work-based learning" means an
educational approach or instructional methodology that uses the
workplace or real work to provide pupils with the knowledge and
skills that will help them connect school experiences to real-life
work activities and future career opportunities.

Now if that isn’t a perfect description of the inherent virtues of STEM learning for young learners, what is? What learning component is more likely to provide students with the skills they will need when they enter the future job market?  Woodworking, maybe? Film?  Hey, both laudable endeavors but not guaranteed the multi-million openings expected in science, technology, engineering and math in the next few years.

5 Tools Everyone In The Educational Robotics Industry Should Be Using

Of course the first answer to the question posited by the title of this piece is a facetious one--lots of money! So let us qualify the question a bit more by asking, "What are 5 tools everyone in the educational robotics industry should be using that most of us in the industry can afford?"

Since learning to code is so important to any STEM discipline, the first tool everyone in the educational robotics industry should be using is the online community and programming language called Scratch. This innovative site helps kids learn its namesake programming language and create interactive stories, games and computer animations. This outstanding tool is actually free!

Since math is basic to any scientific endeavor, the ability to interest and engage students in math is crucial to the educational robotics industry. Our second tool that everyone in the industry should be using, the RobotsLAB BOX, has proved its ability to interest and engage kids in math with an innovative combination of robots and tablets in many progressive school districts. The old teaching standbys like the book and the whiteboard can’t compete with "cool" robot helicopters demonstrating quadratic equations in real-time on a tablet.

NAO Robot can now speak 19 languages thanks to Nuance

NAO Robot Delivers Truly Natural and Conversational Interactions with Nuance's Powerful Voice Recognition and Text-to-Speech, Driving the Future of Human-Robot Communication

We really love NAO, while working with it for 4 years, we've learned a lot about the robot, it's capabilities and especially how we, humans, interact with it. One thing is very clear: every person, either 3 or 90 years old, absolutely adore NAO. The most common response to seeing it "He is so cute!" followed by "Ohhh..." No one can ignore it, or be indifferent, the robot paved it's way to the hearts of everyone around it.

RobotsLAB BOX nominated for the Edison Awards as an Education and Learning Game Changer.

UPDATE: May 1st: ROBOTSLAB BOX IS NAMED A GOLD EDISON AWARD WINNER

We are proud to be among those few considered to be following in the steps of Thomas Alva Edison. With the incandescent light bulb, the phonograph, moving pictures, and many other inventions often taken for granted in the modern world, he left an unmatched legacy of practical, innovative inventiveness and entrepreneurial drive.  Every school child can name one of his inventions, but he was also an inspired salesman and hard-charging businessman who built an investor-owned electric utility and developed mass production methods to profit from his inventions. We believe our RobotsLAB BOX is indeed a alignd with Edison's tradition and meets the four criterion for the Edison Award: Concept, Value, Delivery and Impact.

Math class needs a makeover - Can EdTech be a solution?

NCTM President: My Summer Math Reading List