Category: stem

We lost a true legend this week with the passing of NASA astronaut Jim Lovell at the ripe old age of 97. Lovell commanded the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission back in 1970, and along with crewmates Jack Swigert and Fred Haise — along with just about every person working at or for NASA — he […]
There’s interesting news out of Wyoming, where a coal mine was opened this week. But the fact that it’s the first new coal mine in 50 years isn’t the big news — it’s the mine’s abundance of rare earth elements that’s grabbing the headlines. As we’ve pointed out before, rare earth elements aren’t actually all […]
Anyone who has done the slightest bit of programming knows about the “Hello, World!” program. It’s the archetypal program that one enters to get a feel for a new language or a new architecture; if you can get a machine to print “Hello, World!” back to you, the rest is just details. But what about […]
As the name implies, the OSEP STEM board is an embedded project board primarily aimed at education. You use jumper wires to connect components and a visual block coding language to make it go. I have fond memories of kits from companies like Radio Shack that had dozens of parts on a board, with spring […]
Join us on Wednesday, September 4th at noon Pacific for the Clean Water Technologies Hack Chat with Ryan Beltrán! Access to clean water is something that’s all too easy to take for granted. When the tap is turned, delivering water that won’t sicken or kill you when you drink it, we generally stop worrying. But […]
Join us on Wednesday, August 28th at noon Pacific for the Parallax Update Hack Chat with Chip and Ken Gracey! For a lot of us, our first exposure to the world of microcontrollers was through the offerings of Parallax, Inc. Perhaps you were interested in doing something small and light, and hoping to leverage your programming […]
I was a little surprised to see a news report about Andreas Schleicher, the director of education and skills at OECD — the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Speaking at the World Innovation Summit for Education in Paris, Schleicher thinks that teaching kids to code is a waste of time. In particular, he seems […]