• 'This stuff is cool': Obama goes into high gear at White House science fair

    Saying "this stuff is really cool," President Obama praised the science projects from some high-achieving students at the third White House science fair. NBC's Peter Alexander reports.    

    By Darlene Superville, The Associated Press

    WASHINGTON — It was an offer President Barack Obama couldn't refuse.

    "You're welcome to try this out if you like," the Oakland Park, Fla., high school student said.

    With that, a president who often laments a lifestyle that denies him the pleasure of driving eagerly hopped on the blue-and-silver bicycle in his dark blue suit and pedaled away — never mind that the machinery didn't take him anywhere.

    "Only because these guys really want this," Obama said, gesturing to the small group of reporters and photographers who were brought to a White House garden on Monday to watch the president go from exhibit to exhibit at his third White House science fair.

    He said afterward that the science fair is "one of my favorite events during the course of the year."

    As Obama pedaled, Payton Karr and Kiona Elliot, classmates at Northeast High School, explained their pedal-powered water filtration system. The collapsible, transportable emergency water-sanitation station filters E. coli and other harmful pathogens from contaminated water. During emergencies, the device can be assembled and broken down in less than an hour, and can produce enough water for 20 to 30 people during a 15-hour period.

    Karr and Elliot were among some 30 student teams that were invited to the White House to show off projects that won them top honors in science, technology, engineering and math competitions around the country.

    Jewel Samad / AFP - Getty Images

    President Barack Obama paddles a bicycle-powered emergency water-sanitation system in the East Garden on Monday, during the White House science fair.

    Jewel Samad / AFP - Getty Images

    President Barack Obama checks out a low-cost mini-press that can turn biomass waste products such as banana peels into a viable wood alternative for cooking. The device was designed by students from Pinelands Eco Regional High School in New Jersey.

    Larry Downing / Reuters

    President Barack Obama views the winning entry in the BEST Robotics category with students from St. Vincent de Paul Middle School in Theodore, Ala., as he hosts the White House science fair in the State Dining Room at the White House. The "Vator" robot is designed to mimic a space elevator by lifting cargo up a 10-foot pole.

    Rockets, robots rule
    Rockets and robots were among the exhibits, too, along with a fully functioning prosthetic arm that 17-year-old Easton LaChapelle, of Mancos, Colo., made mostly with parts generated from a 3-D printer. He said it cost just a few hundred dollars to make, far less than the $80,000 replacement arm he said had inspired him.

    The arm apparently functioned up until a few minutes before Obama stopped at Easton's exhibit in the State Dining Room. Easton told Obama that he'd planned for the prosthetic arm to shake the president's hand. Obama shook hands with the disembodied arm anyway, "because it was working," he said.

    Three pint-sized students from Flippen Elementary School in McDonough, Ga., told Obama about the "Cool Pads" they created to help football players stay cool on the field. Evan Jackson, 10, Alec Jackson, 8, and Caleb Robinson, 8, developed the pads for the shoulders, helmet, armpits and groin with built-in temperature sensors to help keep players from overheating. Gatorade is in there, too, so players don't have to leave the field to hydrate.

    Obama called their invention "pretty spiffy."

    During more formal remarks after he visited a total of a dozen exhibits, Obama praised the students and their projects, which included new ways to detect cancer, create alternatives to burning wood for fuel and breeding new types of algae.

    "Young people like these have to make you hopeful about the future of our country," he said.

    AmeriCorps effort
    Obama also announced a new effort to link AmeriCorps national service members with nonprofit groups that promote science, technology, engineering and math. Since taking office in 2009, Obama has been pushing to increase the number of students, including girls, and teachers who pursue these fields.

    He also saw the rocket built by Darius Hooker, 19, of Memphis, Tenn., and his high-school classmate Wesley Carter that propelled eggs more than 800 feet into the air and then brought them down unbroken in less than a minute.

    "Did the eggs come down OK?" Obama asked.

    Hooker said in a telephone interview afterward that he was always interested in "anything that goes up" and that he now thinks of himself as a role model.

    "We motivate a lot of people that's our age, younger than us and older than us," he said. Hooker is currently studying for a license in aircraft mechanics at Tennessee Technology Center in Memphis.

    More about science at the White House:

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  • Internet takes education to new level: Will universities make the grade?

    Dozens of elite institutions are now partnering with start-up companies such as Coursera, Udacity and edX, to deliver massive open online courses. NBC's Rehema Ellis reports.

    By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News


    More and more universities have made a place for the Internet in today's educational offerings, but will universities still have a place in tomorrow's educational environment?

    "We're about to undergo a tectonic transformation in education," Caltech astrophysicist George Djorgovski, a pioneer in scientific applications for virtual worlds, told me on Wednesday. "This is the start of an 'S' curve, and universities will be unrecognizable in a decade or two."

    The rapid rise of next-generation distance education, and what it means for educational institutions, is our theme on "Virtually Speaking Science," an hour-long talk show that goes out to listeners on BlogTalkRadio and to a live audience in the Second Life virtual world. Djorgovski is my guest beginning at 9 p.m. ET Wednesday. If you miss hearing the show live, don't fret: You can always catch up with it as a podcast on BlogTalkRadio or iTunes.

    Djorgovski has had years of experience in virtual worlds, thanks to his role as the director of the Meta Institute for Computational Astrophysics. MICA closed down last year, but Djorgovski is still involved in virtual-reality projects — including the first class that he taught as a massive open online course, or MOOC. "Galaxies and Cosmology" was offered over the Internet via Coursera, one of several MOOC ventures.

    "It took way more work than I thought," Djorgovski recalled.

    More than 28,000 students signed up online, and 2,000 stayed on for the whole course. One of the students was an 80-year-old Caltech alumnus. "I was impressed and surprised by just how dedicated these online students are," Djorgovski said. "This was not a goofball pretty-picture class, this was a serious course with differential equations."

    Djorgovski set up a Facebook page for the course and kept office hours in Second Life. Although most of the students interacted through Coursera's discussion forums, about a dozen of them sent their computerized avatars to visit "Curious George" in his virtual office. "All of those who did were absolutely delighted," Djorgovski said. "They thought this was the greatest thing."

    Second Life / Courtesy of George Djorgovski

    Caltech astrophysicist George Djorgovski, a.k.a. Curious George, holds office hours for his cosmology course in the Second Life virtual world.

    No money changes hands, and no college credits are given for completing the course. Nevertheless, the experience showed Djorgovski that "there is this great need or desire for extended education in some novel sense." For many of the international students, MOOCs provide the only way to get the kind of knowledge that America's universities can offer.

    But MOOCs also raise deep questions for universities. "Now everybody's thinking, how are they going to do this?" Djorgovski said. "You can get 80 percent of higher education online for free, so why would you spend $300,000?"

    Djorgovski said he's less interested in the business aspects, and more interested in the long-term effects on academic institutions. He wonders whether the research and the educational functions of a university will become decoupled, particularly at the undergraduate level. And he wonders whether educators will adapt. The idea of forcing educators and students to be in the same physical location may seem terribly outmoded in the year 2033.

    "We will not be firing 99 percent of the professors, but I think their jobs will change," Djorgovski said. "It may be an even more painful transition than it has been in other fields. If we are lucky, it will be as mild as journalism or the music industry. If we are not lucky, it will be like buggy whips."

    Do you agree? Tune in "Virtually Speaking Science" on Wednesday, join the audience in Second Life, or download the podcast later.

    'Virtually Speaking Science' podcasts:

    Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

    "Virtually Speaking Science" airs on Wednesdays on BlogTalkRadio, with a live audience in the Exploratorium's Second Life auditorium. In addition to Alan Boyle, the hosts include Tom Levenson, director of MIT's graduate program in science writing; and Jennifer Ouellette, science writer and "Cocktail Party Physics" blogger.

  • 13-year-old boldly sends Hello Kitty where no cat doll has gone before

    Watch a recap of Lauren Rojas' high-flying project for a seventh-grade science class.

    By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News


    High-altitude balloon missions are so mainstream that iPhones, "Star Trek" action figures, Lego toys and political bobblehead dolls have all taken their turns rising to the edge of space — but what about Hello Kitty? Now the lovable Japanese plush cat has made its own mark on the final frontier, thanks to 13-year-old Lauren Rojas.

    Rojas, a seventh-grader at Cornerstone Christian School in Antioch, Calif., settled on the idea of sending a Hello Kitty doll to the stratosphere for her science project. The doll was provided by her dad, who picked it up during up a business trip to Tokyo. The girl (who was 12 at the time) perched the kitty in a cute silver rocket ship, positioned it amid flight gear from High Altitude Science, festooned the rig with GoPro Hero2 video cameras, filled up the lighter-than-air balloon — and then let 'er rip.

    The aim of Rojas' experiment was to gauge air pressure and temperature as the balloon-borne experiment package rose — and she picked up some interesting effects: The peak winds exceeded 60 mph at the 10,000-foot level. The temperature fell from 43 degrees Fahrenheit (6 degrees Celsius) as low as 22 degrees below zero F (-30 degrees C) when the balloon popped at an altitude of 93,625 feet (28,537 meters).

    That's less than a third of the way to the internationally accepted boundary of outer space, which is at an altitude of 62 miles or 100 kilometers. But as this YouTube video about the flight demonstrates, it's high enough to get a great view of Earth below the black sky of space. The package fell back to Earth and landed 47 miles (75 kilometers) from the launch site, 50 feet up in the branches of a tree. Which is an apt place for a wayward kitty to end up.

    For more about the feat, check out this report from the New York Daily News.

    Still more high-altitude adventures:

    Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

    Published at 3:58 p.m. ET Feb. 6.

  • Steve Jobs: Second greatest innovator of all time?

    Lemelson-MIT Program

    Steve Jobs ranked behind Thomas Edison in a question to young Americans about who is the greatest innovator of all time.

    By John Roach, Contributing Writer, NBC News

    Apple co-founder Steve Jobs ranks behind only Thomas Edison as the world's greatest innovator of all time in a survey released today on young Americans' attitudes about invention and innovation.

    Jobs' innovations include the iPhone and iPad, the popular gadgets that are helping to revolutionize how we communicate with each other and sent Apple's stock to a record high Wednesday. 

    His second-place finish in the survey of Americans aged 16 to 25 surprised Leigh Estabrooks, the invention education officer with the Lemelson-MIT Program, which conducted the survey.

    "Here we have this innovation role model who has changed the way we live and yet young people still go back to Thomas Edison," she told me. "While he did great and wonderful things, most of his work was in the 1880s."

    The result highlights the fact that invention and innovation are primarily taught in history class, not the math and science courses that are the foundation for careers in invention and innovation.

    "Thomas Edison comes up because all students take history," she said. That's where we learned, for example, about his life-changing electric power distribution system and his money-making stock ticker.

    Next-generation innovators
    The Lemelson-MIT Program aims to foster an innovative spirit in America's youth. The annual Invention Index helps the program gauge the level of interest among young people in becoming innovators.

    This year's results show that young Americans are aware of the role invention and innovation play in their lives and its importance as an economic driver, but 60 percent feel inhibited in pursing inventive careers themselves.

    Many — 34 percent — said they simply don’t know enough about these fields. "That's daunting for a teenager to think about going into a field that they don’t know much about," Estabrooks noted.

    Other students consider these fields too challenging to pursue and/or feel they were unprepared for such a career track in school.

    According to Estabrooks, increasing awareness of career options in these fields is a key step. That means more mentors coming into classrooms to talk, especially to elementary and middle school students.

    "The sooner we can share with kids the things they can do with science, technology, engineering and math, the better off we'll be," she said. 

    "It is awfully hard to catch up with the math once you're in high school and almost impossible once you're in college."

    "And it is hard," she added. "Therefore mentors can help by encouraging students to stick with it."

    Hands-on experiences
    More than just listening to an engineer or computer programmer talk, hands-on experiences inside and outside the classroom are paramount to fostering a new generation of innovators.

    The survey shows American youth hunger for these opportunities, such as invention projects at school and creative field trips. Simply "a place to develop an invention" would be a good start for 52 percent of the respondents.

    The opportunity to invent is working its way into classrooms across the country thanks to initiatives such as a framework for next-generation science standards released in July 2011 by the National Academy of Sciences.

    The framework outlines a way for science teachers to incorporate engineering into their lessons, Kristina Peterson, head of the middle school science department at the Lakeside School in Seattle, Wash., explained to me.

    (Disclosures: I'm a Lakeside alumnus as is Microsoft co-founder and chairman Bill Gates, another great innovator who, it turns out, wasn't included in the survey. Msnbc.com is a joint venture between Microsoft and Comcast/NBC Universal.)

    The school is in its second year of a revamped science curriculum that includes an engineering thread in all the science courses, grades 5-8, partially based on materials from the Boston Museum of Science.

    "A key thing is engaging students in what's called engineering design process," Peterson said. "It has them not only inventing things, but also the big picture of the process of inventing."

    Students learn to brainstorm ideas, research them, and communicate their goals, for example. They also learn to evaluate what they create so they can improve it with a redesign.

    Other schools around the country are involved with programs such as Lemelson-MIT's own InvenTeams as well as First Robotics and First Lego League that provide the hands-on experience outside of the class.

    And outside of the classroom learning has its advantages, according to Estabrooks.

    For one, there's a finite amount time within the school day to learn. Students can tinker more outside of class time. As well, grades don't apply after school.

    "One thing about inventors is that we encourage them to fail quickly and fail often," she said. "And in our academics, we certainly don't encourage our youth to fail."

    Steve Jobs, who died last October, was certainly prone to fail. Products from the Apple III computer (1981) to Apple TV (2007) are considered among his misses. 

    He was even fired from Apple in 1985, a humbling experience that led to his most fruitful innovations, he said during a commencement speech at Stanford in 2005:

    "The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life." 

    More on innovation education:

    John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

     

     

     

     

     

     

    Archbishop Mitty High School students say the iPad brings diverse subject materials — but no more excuse for missed homework.

  • Evolution defenders to fight climate skeptics

    Laura Rauch / AP file

    This file photo shows the reduction in water levels due to drought on Lake Mead in Nevada. Scientists say climate changes and a growing population could conspire to dry up Lake Mead and Lake Powell within 13 years

    By John Roach, Contributing Writer, NBC News

    A national organization best known for its defense of teaching evolution has added climate change to its agenda in a move that highlights a brewing controversy inside the classroom.

    Across the country, teachers and schools boards are being pressured to teach that the science of climate change is controversial when, in fact, it is not, according to the National Center for Science Education.

    For example, the school board in Los Alamitos, Calif., made headlines in 2011 for requiring teachers of an environmental science class to ensure their curriculum presented all sides of the climate change issue.

    "That is so common with evolution," Eugenie Scott, director of the National Center for Science Education, told me.

    Anti-evolution groups often push school boards to include teaching of controversial ideas such as intelligent design inside the science classroom, even though it has been ruled as "creationism in disguise."

    Climate controversy
    On climate change, NCSE notes that mountains of scientific evidence show that the planet is warming and human activities are part of the reason why. That's not controversial, it says.

    Nevertheless, anti-global warming messages spread by groups such as the Heartland Institute, Scott said, are used by grassroots activists to pressure school boards and educators to teach that global warming is controversial.

    James Taylor, an environmental policy fellow at the institute, told the Los Angeles Times that this pushback is needed to prevent "an important and ongoing scientific debate" about human-caused climate change from turning into "a propaganda assault on impressionable students."

    Scott said NCSE will weigh in on the side of science, giving parents, teachers, and school boards advice and legal support to help maintain the integrity of climate science inside the classroom.

    "That's our ecological niche," Scott said. "Nobody else is doing this."

    Growing movement?
    "The climate change education situation today is about where the teaching of evolution was 20 to 25 years ago," noted Scott. "We are trying to get ahead of the situation before positions get hardened."

    Unlike the teaching of evolution, which is often a standard section in biology class, climate change science is scattered throughout the curriculum. 

    It is sometimes found in junior high Earth science class, for example, and is starting to be featured in biology and geology courses. More often, it is found as part of senior year environmental science courses.

    NCSE's goal is to help science teachers cover climate change inside their classroom with information on the factors that influence it, such as increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels.

    Teachers ought to be able to discuss this without controversy and explain that there are several policy proposals out there on what to do, said Scott.

    But that's where the science teaching should stop.

    "We are not a policy institute. We are not going to argue about cap and trade or a carbon tax," Scott noted in reference to two policy proposals.

    More on science education:

     

    John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website.