Talia Milgrom-Elcott (Founder & Executive Director, 100Kin10): Want To Keep Students Engaged? Ask, Don’t Tell (Forbes) 

Quick: Think about something new you learned in the last year. It could be anything – an improved swing, a management technique, a coding language, a recipe. How did you learn it? New research suggests it wasn’t through a lecture. Maybe a teacher asked you a great question that made you articulate something for the first time. Maybe you took something you learned, rolled up your sleeves, and used it to solve a different challenge. When we think back to our time in school, the teachers who stick out are the ones who actively engaged us in our learning. New research suggests that those teachers are the minority, but they don’t have to be.

How ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ Primes Students for Interdisciplinary Learning, Including STEM (Mind/Shift) 
A group of Grade 9 students in Texas who substantially outperformed their district on a statewide standardized test all had one surprising thing in common: they all were members of the school’s Dungeons & Dragons club. A coincidence? Otherwise, how does a fantasy role-playing game produce improved test scores? The obvious explanation is that the club draws the bright kids who are already academically inclined. But many of the kids in the club at the Title I school had histories of struggling with academics.

Struggle for the Future: Schools Lag in Preparing Students for the Age of Automation (The74) 

Thomas A. Edison Career and Technical High School, a sprawling, low-slung campus on a hillside in eastern Queens, offers its students many ways to prepare for a job. On a summer-ish morning in early October, graphic arts students in a darkened classroom animated and edited their striking concoctions on propped-up 27-inch Wacom tablets. Not far away, a cybersecurity class sitting in narrow adjoining stations — calling to mind traders in a high-tech boiler room — worked to locate network breaches as the clock ticked down.

Diversity in STEM

NSF Grant Unites Four Hispanic-Serving Institutions to Help Diversify STEM Faculty (UC Merced) 
UC Merced is partnering with UC Santa Barbara and two California State University campuses — Fresno and Channel Islands — on a project to create a more diverse STEM faculty at colleges and universities nationwide. The quartet has been awarded a total of $2 million from the National Science Foundation’s Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP) program for a joint research project intended to increase the number of underrepresented minority faculty members in STEM fields.

H-1B: Immigrants founded more than half of U.S. tech unicorns, study says (Mercury News) 
The controversial H-1B visa has been highlighted in a new report on research that found 55 percent of U.S. tech startups valued at $1 billion or more were founded or co-founded by immigrants. Among the foreign entrepreneurs who used the H-1B visa to get established in the U.S. are SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who’s also CEO of Tesla; Michelle Zatlyn, chief operating officer of San Francisco network-services firm Cloudflare; and Jyoti Bansal, founder of AppDynamics, a San Francisco performance management and operations analytics company, according to the report from the National Foundation for American Policy.

STEM Competitions

Now Open: 2019 Bart Kamen Memorial FIRST Scholarship (FIRST) 
In 2012, the Dr. Bart Kamen Memorial FIRST Scholarship was established, in memory of long tenured and passionate FIRST supporter, distinguished pediatric oncologist, cancer pharmacologist and devoted family man, Bart Kamen. Dr. Bart Kamen was known by his colleagues as a brilliant scholar, compassionate physician, dedicated mentor and gentle man whose unfettered enthusiasm for learning, teaching, talking science and challenging the mainstay with his out of the box thinking for betterment of care was unmatched.

Extreme Redesign Challenge Calls on Students to Submit 3D Designs (T.H.E. Journal) 

College, middle and high school students have the opportunity to win scholarships by showing off their 3D design prowess in Stratasys’ annual “Extreme Redesign Challenge.” Students can either create and submit an original design for jewelry, art or architecture in one category or make an existing design better for another category. The idea is to encourage students to come up with the “most creative, mechanically sound and realistically achievable design using 3D printing.” However, access to a 3D printer isn’t essential to entering the competitions

EdTech

Students to Learn App Design with Swift Programming Online (T.H.E. Journal) 
Earlier this year a nonprofit that trains high school students in technical skills joined up with a local online college to enroll 25 seniors in a course to learn programming. Based on the success of that program, the organizations have announced plans to expand the effort to more students across the country. Genesys Works teamed up with Columbia College Chicago Online to deliver online Swift coding programs for local students, using K-12 curriculum created by Apple for its Everyone Can Code initiative and resources created by the college.

Top K–12 Tech Tools for Teaching STEM (EdTech Magazine) 
As companies and market experts forecast computer science and engineering skills as crucial to the future workforce, K–12 schools have been rapidly developing STEM programs in order to prepare their students to be the employees of tomorrow. “[It’s] imperative that schools lead the way, not just in offering stronger STEM programming, but in advocating for it with the community and championing it with students — especially at the K–12 level, where they are first exposed to it,” Ryan Petersen writes for EdTech.

Idaho

Idaho becomes second state in the country to adopt all 9 CS policies (Code.org) 

Idaho just became the second state in the country to adopt a robust policy plan to expand computer science in schools across the state. This is an impressive milestone and shows what can be achieved when teachers, students, legislators and community members work collaboratively toward the expansion of computer science education! The release of the state’s K-12 CS State Plan includes all nine policies developed by the Code.org Advocacy Coalition, which cement CS as a fundamental element of public education. So far Arkansas is the only other state in the country to adopt all nine policies.

#MWMSummit2018: Million Women Mentors October Newsletter 
It’s here! The Annual MWM Awards Gala is taking place tonight in Washington DC preceding tomrrow’s Summit. Follow all the updates on social media through #MWMSummit2018, help the movement show what mentoring relationships are all about through the #MWMentorIRL campaign, and catch up on the latest Million Women Mentors news by clicking the link above for October’s MWM Newsletter!

#MWMentorIRL: What It Actually Takes to Mentor Over a Million Women and Girls in STEM 
MWM will gather again this year at our annual Summit & Awards Gala in DC this week to celebrate some pretty significant milestones: over 2.3 million commitments to mentor and over 1 million completed mentor relationships have been made as a result of MWM! These achievements could never have been accomplished without the collaborative work of 4 Governors, 13 Lt. Governors, local networks in 46 states, 60+ corporate sponsors, and 1600+ partner organizations. MWM and its partners do this work because we strongly believe that the practice of mentoring is one of the most important tools in advancing women and girls in STEM fields and careers. While we celebrate the numbers of MWM’s achievements at this year’s Summit, we also want to go #BeyondTheBuzzword, and show what mentoring actually looks like in the real world in order to inspire even more to join this movement.

Join Verizon and NYC Media Lab soon at Harvard GSE: Learn about a $100k award opportunity 
NYC Media Lab has partnered with Verizon to develop and produce the 5G EdTech Challenge, a nationwide open call to find innovative, cutting-edge, education technologies that will transform middle school education. Challenge winners will receive a $100,000 grant to build upon their innovative research and nonprofit missions in a 5G-enabled environment. The challenge aims to support the classroom of the future—one without walls, where learning is boundless.

Tips for Successful Careers in Industry: Thursday, November 5, 2018 from 2:00 – 3:15 p.m. EST (ERN) 
AAAS and the Emerging Researchers National (ERN) Conference in STEM are pleased to announce the 2nd in a series of STEM career webinars: Tips for Successful Careers in Industry. This webinar is designed to help students and others interested in industry careers gain an understanding of the industry landscape, what technical and business skills are needed to be successful in industry, and steps to prepare for industry careers.