The world needs engineers. For many of us geeks, we have an engineer in our life (or are one ourselves) and have been exposed to the impact engineering has on society and industry in the United States. For many folks in the U.S., especially teens, the glorious and productive field ...

Innovation can come from a lot of places. Often, it comes from years of research and development from companies or investors with budgets and facilities, from scientists with ideas to be tested or entrepreneurs with new businesses that challenge the status quo. But sometimes it takes an outside view of ...

Every year at science fairs across the country there are always a few projects that just stand out. They are done at a caliber far beyond what you’d expect from the middle school and high school sciences. Companies such as Intel with their International Science and Engineering Fair do a ...

This Friday, NASA will launch an Atlas V rocket that will be contain a very special payload. Not only will the rocket be carrying Juno, a space probe that is being sent to Jupiter to study the fifth planet from the Sun, but there will be a few unique stowaways. ...

The road to the Imagine Cup world finals isn’t easy. There are regional events and national competitions you must win to advance and represent your country in a given category. But before that, you need to have an idea. And not just any idea — an idea that can change ...

The ninth annual Imagine Cup by Microsoft kicked off yesterday in New York City. Students and their teams from all of the world are here in a competition that is affectionately called the “Nerd Olympics.” As I found out last year covering the event in Poland, that term of endearment ...

Want to have a say in what world-changing projects get recognized at this year’s Imagine Cup? Voting has been open for a couple weeks and there are some great ideas from teams all of the world working to solve some of the world’s toughest challenges. Each team is made up of ...

What if Nikola Tesla had time-traveling assistants who are sent to the future to help inspire the spirit of invention in the children of the 21st century? Absurd? Yes. Exciting? Doubly so! This is the pitch that a trio of Arizona-area makers are using in their Kickstarter campaign to create ...

A few months ago, Microsoft launched the Kodu Cup, a competition for kids ages 9 to 17 to design games using Microsoft’s Kodu game development platform for Windows. It’s a smart and simple environment that gives game designers the ability to create games in a 3D world, populated by objects ...

Neal Bascomb’s The New Cool: A Visionary Teacher, His FIRST Robotics Team, and the Ultimate Battle of Smarts offers an insider account of Dean Kamen’s famous robotics competition for high schoolers. (See James Kelly’s review on GeekDad earlier today.) Focusing on the award-winning Dos Pueblos Engineering Academy Penguineers, and their ...