Fox News reporters Kevin Tracy and Christopher Howard highlight how MIT alumna Laila Shabir created a summer camp aimed at inspiring girls interesting in playing and creating video games. “It’s like teaching someone how to paint,” Shabir explains. “You know once you teach them how to paint they can express themselves through that medium. That’s exactly what we’re doing at camp.”
WCVB’s Mike Wankum visits the Beaver Works Summer Institute to see how high school students are gaining hands-on engineering experience. Robert Shin, director of Beaver Works, explains that the program is aimed at “inspiring the next generation.”
MIT was named the number one STEM school in the country on Forbes’ 2018 list of the top 25 STEM colleges, reports Carter Coudriet for Forbes. Coudriet notes that, “MIT’s high ranking is driven by its grads’ career success.”
WCVB-TV’s Karen Holmes Ward highlights how MIT students created a summer camp, called DynaMIT, aimed at getting middle school students interested in STEM fields. MIT undergraduate Julia Cho explains that DynaMIT tries to, “focus on hands-on activities because we know that students are much more interested in those sorts of experiments and places where they can explore to their heart’s content.”
In a VICE News Tonight climate segment, MIT postdocs Volodymyr Koman and Seon-Yeong Kwak explain their technique for making plants glow in the dark to a first-grade class in Boston. Following a demonstration mixing plant glucose with the specialized nanoparticles, one student exclaims in disbelief, “no battery or anything!”
In an article for The Week, John Holden speaks with Prof. Kripa Varanasi about what inspired him to pursue a career science. Varanasi recalls how his mother, “was instrumental in driving my ambitions. She used to buy me amazing electronics kits when I was a kid.”
Science reporter Philip Shapira highlights Prof. Neil Gershenfeld’s new book, co-written with his brothers, about digital fabrication. Shapira writes that the, “Gershenfelds engagingly alert us not only to the opportunities that digital fabrication presents but also to the societal and governance challenges that the widespread diffusion of this technology will generate.”
STAT reporter Hyacinth Empinado highlights Media Lab Research Scientist David Kong’s new project Biota Beats, which uses bacterial data as the basis for hip-hop melodies. “Music is one of the great universal languages of our human society. We thought this would be a really, really wonderful way to engage the broader public and get them excited about science through music,” said Kong.
WHDH speaks with MIT staff member Maia Weinstock, who designed the original concept for the Women of NASA LEGO set. Weinstock explained that she is “really excited to see teachers and parents and kids tell me their stories of how they are going to use the set.”
Writing for The New York Times about educational technology, Prof. Cynthia Breazeal describes her research examining the importance of social cues in learning from technology. “If we want to use technology to help people learn, we have to provide information in the way the human mind evolved to receive it,” she explains.
CNN Greece highlights the "Maker Summer School," a weeklong workshop for unaccompanied refugees in Athens developed by researchers from the MIT D-Lab. The article, which is in Greek, explores how participants spent six days learning the design process by making real products they can use in their daily lives.
FOX 25 reporter Bob Dumas features a dance-party lamp developed by MIT researchers aimed at getting girls interested in STEM fields. “There’s research that shows girls, around middle school age, their participation in STEM classes and curriculum starts to drop off," explains Prof. Maria Yang. She adds that she wants to, "get girls back on the STEM train by engaging their interests.”
Mercury News reporter Jasmine Leyva highlights how students in Campbell, California are participating in the Zero Robotics program, which “aims to take students’ work to the moon and beyond, all while teaching students about space exploration, computer science and coding.” The Zero Robotics program is led by the MIT Space Systems Lab, Innovation Learning Center and Aurora Flight Sciences.
Preston County News & Journal reporter Theresa Marthey writes that students from Preston County, West Virginia are working on code to move SPHERES satellites on the International Space Station as part of the Zero Robotics program. Instructor Amanda Rehe explains that, “students have direct access with students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to use as a resource and assist with coding help.”
Boston Globe reporter Jeremy Fox writes about a new study by MIT researchers examining whether math games can be beneficial in helping children learn. The researchers found that, “children who played math games consistently showed a better grasp of the concepts…but that understanding did not appear to help in elementary school.”