STEM+ [Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics] +PLUS+

This is an introductory course to learn programming with Java, one of the most in-demand programming languages designed to work across multiple software platforms. Java developers are highly sought after professionals, and increasingly so, Java is a staple of every technologist’s resume!

This Java learning series is comprised of three parts, of which Part 1 introduces programming on the basis of familiar concepts, like calculators and games. Powerful concepts such as functional abstraction, the object oriented programming (OOP) paradigm and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are progressively introduced throughout the five weeks. Examples and case studies are provided so that learners can implement simple programs on their own or by collaborating with peers.

Part 2 will focus on how to write “good” programs and Part 3 will deal with fundamental data structures. Part 2 and Part 3 will be scheduled soon.

Programming knowledge is not only needed to program today’s devices such as computers and smartphones, but it also opens doors to computational thinking, i.e., the application of computing techniques to every-day processes.

With new content and enhanced problems, this is an improved version of the course released in April 2015. Previous learners are welcome to enroll for a second time, and continue learning!

Throughout this course, emphasis is placed on immediate feedback and having fun. Enroll today and start your journey in the field of computer science!

For the first time, scientists have produced 3D-printed structures made of living cells that are big enough and strong enough to replace human tissues.

A bioprinter, described today in Nature Biotechnology, was used to make ear, bone, and muscle structures out of plastic-like materials and living cells belonging either to humans, rabbits, rats, or mice. The cells survived the printing process — a feat that has not been easy to accomplish in the past — and the structures were stable enough to be successfully implanted in rodents, the researchers report. If the technology works in humans the way it has in animals, doctors may soon find themselves using bioprinters to produce replacement cartilage and bone for people who have been injured, using a patient's own cells.

The first ever direct detection of gravitational waves has been made by researchers working on the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (aLIGO) in the US. The breakthrough – announced today at a news conference in Washington, DC – ends a decades-long hunt for these ripples in space–time. This monumental observation marks the beginning of the era of gravitational-wave astronomy and provides evidence for one of the last unverified predictions of Einstein's general theory of relativity.
The waves were produced from the collision of two black holes of 36 and 29 solar masses, respectively, which merged to form a spinning, 62-solar-mass black hole, some 1.3 billion light-years (410 mpc) away in an event dubbed GW150914. The detection was made on 14 September last year and was measured while the newly upgraded aLIGO detectors – one in Hanford, Washington, and the other in Livingston, Louisiana – were being calibrated before the first observational run began four days later.

ABSTRACT
On September 14, 2015 at 09:50:45 UTC the two detectors of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory simultaneously observed a transient gravitational-wave signal. The signal sweeps upwards in frequency from 35 to 250 Hz with a peak gravitational-wave strain of 1.0×10−21. It matches the waveform predicted by general relativity for the inspiral and merger of a pair of black holes and the ringdown of the resulting single black hole. The signal was observed with a matched-filter signal-to-noise ratio of 24 and a false alarm rate estimated to be less than 1 event per 203 000 years, equivalent to a significance greater than 5.1σ. The source lies at a luminosity distance of 410+160−180 Mpc corresponding to a redshift z=0.09+0.03−0.04. In the source frame, the initial black hole masses are 36+5−4M⊙ and 29+4−4M⊙, and the final black hole mass is 62+4−4M⊙, with 3.0+0.5−0.5M⊙c2 radiated in gravitational waves. All uncertainties define 90% credible intervals. These observations demonstrate the existence of binary stellar-mass black hole systems. This is the first direct detection of gravitational waves and the first observation of a binary black hole merger.


Received 21 January 2016
DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.116.061102


This article is available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI.

Many parents want their children to learn to code. Tech leaders and educators are pushing schools to add more computer-science classes, and families often see programming as an essential skill for the future.

But unlike reading to your children or teaching them to count, preparing children to code can feel daunting and unnatural. Many parents think they can’t help because they don’t know math or programming themselves.

Increasingly, though, parents who have never written a line of code are finding ways to teach their children basic programming skills. Some tap websites, gaming apps or online puzzles using visual programming languages designed for children. Others focus on teaching the kind of thinking that coding requires. For instance, even young children can learn how to break tasks into steps and perform them in order—a programming concept called sequencing—or to repeat a series of steps until a task is complete, a concept called loops.

Australia is calling women and children to begin participating in their budding National Innovation and Science Agenda, just beginning to unfold as the government pours $48 million into a STEM literacy program–and another $13 million encouraging women to seek careers in the areas of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

Funding began in December as the Australian government begins working steadily to catch up with other countries who are currently being so vocal and hands-on about getting STEM curriculums into schools–namely, the US, China, and Singapore, and with many European countries emphasizing the importance as well.

Edutopia blogger Andrew Miller looks at the enhanced possibilities of using 21st century skills to engage students with real-world challenges through combining the pedagogical model of PBL with the rich content area of STEAM.

"Nanotechnology: Super Small Science" is a six-part series that shows viewers how atoms and molecules that are thousands of times smaller than the width of a human hair can be used as building blocks to create future technology. The series features a dozen world class American researchers, including quantum physicist and National Medal of Science winner Paul Alivisatos.

Discover information, examples, and tools related to incorporating aspects of the arts, design, and the humanities into STEM-based school activities.

Albemarle County Public Schools spans 726 square miles, educating 13,700 students among 26 schools -- including two public charter schools. The district consists of high-poverty to middle-class schools, rural, suburban, and demographically diverse urban schools -- including one where over 60 languages are spoken.

"We serve children from age four, all the way up to our post-high students, who are our most handicapped students that stay with us until they are 21," says Superintendent Pam Moran. "We want all of our learners to embrace learning, to excel, and to own their future."

Reaching all students through student-driven learning is Albemarle's vision. One way the district achieves this is through maker education, which taps into their students' passions, fueling their engagement and giving them autonomy in designing their own learning.

A five-year, $500,000 grant will fund two professorships for new female faculty in the computer science and electrical and computer engineering departments at Duke University.

The grant from the Henry Luce Foundation’s Clare Boothe Luce (CBL) Program will further the university’s goal of attracting and supporting more women in those research areas, and creating more opportunity for women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).

Why are the Higgs field and dark energy so weak? Find the answer and you could earn yourself a Nobel Prize, says Dr Karl.

Around the year 1900, the astronomers had a big problem — "what powered the Sun?"

They knew how much energy the Sun emitted, and they knew how big the Sun was. But even if the Sun were powered by something loaded with energy (such as coal), it should have burnt out after a few million years.

And yet the geologists were saying that the Earth was at least 10 or 20 million years old — and almost certainly, much older.

The answer to that problem came with discovery of radioactivity a few years later

To celebrate the UN Day for Women and Girls in Science during February, Campus Review spoke to nine women engaged in the field.

The women are studying, researching, teaching and promoting fields including biology, biophysics, chemistry and paleontology, among others, at the University of Queensland. We asked them to share their stories, explain some of the challenges they have faced and identify inspirations in their chosen field.

Abstract
The discovery of the gravitational-wave (GW) source GW150914 with the Advanced LIGO detectors provides the first observational evidence for the existence of binary black hole (BH) systems that inspiral and merge within the age of the universe. Such BH mergers have been predicted in two main types of formation models, involving isolated binaries in galactic fields or dynamical interactions in young and old dense stellar environments. The measured masses robustly demonstrate that relatively "heavy" BHs ( ) can form in nature. This discovery implies relatively weak massive-star winds and thus the formation of GW150914 in an environment with a metallicity lower than about 1/2 of the solar value. The rate of binary-BH (BBH) mergers inferred from the observation of GW150914 is consistent with the higher end of rate predictions ( Gpc−3 yr−1) from both types of formation models. The low measured redshift () of GW150914 and the low inferred metallicity of the stellar progenitor imply either BBH formation in a low-mass galaxy in the local universe and a prompt merger, or formation at high redshift with a time delay between formation and merger of several Gyr. This discovery motivates further studies of binary-BH formation astrophysics. It also has implications for future detections and studies by Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo, and GW detectors in space.

For the last three years, Eddie Woo has been recording his regular classroom lessons and putting them up on YouTube (unedited). It all started when one of his students was diagnosed with a serious illness and had to take a lot of time out of school for treatment and recovery.

A STEM curriculum introduces students to real-world engineering

Berrien Springs Public Schools in rural Michigan started off with a modest enough goal: to add an engineering component to their curriculum in order to draw out-of-district students to their schools and to meet anticipated state standards. But perhaps not even they could have foreseen the sea change that came next.

These days, first graders design a shoe for a traveler going to an extreme climate. Second graders investigate numerical relationships and sequence and structure required in computer programs. Fourth graders develop a vehicle restraint system. Middle and high school students build VEX robots and program them using RobotC software. They also use Autodesk Inventor to create 3D models that are then printed on their own 3D printer. And all grades are doing various levels of coding.

Educators can bring creative people into STEM fields by showing students the creativity in what they're doing and how it lets them explore their own creative interests.

At Charles R. Drew Charter School, third-grade students use PBL to prepare for the next Snowpocalypse.

Several CAS members have been working hard for some time on this newly published document discussing computational thinking for both primary and secondary schools.

This guide aims to help develop a shared understanding of the teaching of computational thinking in schools. It presents a conceptual framework of computational thinking, describes pedagogic approaches for teaching and offers guides for assessment. It is complementary to the two CAS guides published in November 2013 (Primary) and June 2014 (Secondary) in supporting the implementation of the new National Curriculum and embraces the CAS Barefoot and CAS QuickStart Computing descriptions of computational thinking. Computational thinking lies at the heart of the computing curriculum but it also supports learning and thinking in other areas of the curriculum.

Download the computational thinking guidance

This 6-part video series, produced by NBC Learn in partnership with the National Science Foundation, explores the hidden world of nanotechnology.

AS A kid mesmerised by art Eleanor Gates-Stuart did not have an inkling where this passion would take her in life.

She had no idea it would send her to the depths of the world’s biggest gold mine in outback WA, to labs in California to understand the ID coding of fingerprints, to Taiwan to work as a professor of ‘techno arts’.

She could never have envisaged that one day she’d lure crowds of hundreds of thousands to watch giant insects projected onto buildings in Canberra, for bringing about the production of perfectly scaled titanimum weevils, for fusing science, art and communication together in a riotous array of artworks, scientific papers and scientific collaborations.

Download STEAM Education's US 2016 Most Influential Educational Conferences List as our gift to you!

The Marymount School of New York's Student Technology Leadership Team and our network of student technology teams are pleased to announce the 2016 Student Technology Conference, a free, virtual that brings students from around the world to talk about educational technology, collaborations and innovation. This conference will be held online on Saturday, January 30, 2016 from 9 AM to 9 PM, NYC (US-Eastern) Time.

Conference Mission Statement
The 2016 Student Technology Conference provides an international forum for the presentation, discussion and sharing of educational technology in schools and other academic settings. This conference, by students in grades 6-12 and for all, is committed to:
- Fostering a better understanding of how students use technology in education and to engage students, teachers and administrators in a conversation about technology.
- Assisting teachers and administrators in understanding how students use technology both in and out of the classroom.
- Strengthening the relationship between students, teachers and administrators about technology in the curriculum.

Strands
This year's conference strands will include:
- Making, Design, and 3D Printing
- Projects and Collaborations
- Educational Tools
- Students and Social Media
- Entrepreneurship
- Technology and Social Justice

Attending
There is no cost to attend. Instructions and the schedule of sessions will be here.