Watsonville High School freshmen Idzel Cano, 14, and Brianna Flores, 14, are among 25 talented Bay Area girls who will be honored by the National Center for Women and Information with an award for aspirations in computing Sunday at the Computer History Museum in San Jose. Cano and Flores learned game design while middle-schoolers through the Girl Game Company, an after-school ITEST project sponsored by Scotts Valley-based ETR Associates in

Expanding the minds of teenagers, and their career options, is the goal of the Harlem Children Society. The non-profit places low-income high school students in real working labs all over the city and gives them stipends. It was founded 10 years ago by Dr. Sat Bhattacharya, a molecular geneticist and cancer researcher who works at Sloan Kettering and Rockefeller University. By offering internships with pretigious science and medical labls, Dr

Saint Paul Public Schools is working with the Kitty Andersen Youth Science Center at the Science Museum of Minnesota, and Saint Paul College to bring a high level engineering program to students at Saint Paul public high schools. Students, who are interviewed and hired by the Science Museum, become a part of Invention Crew (an ITEST project also known as IDEA). Using professional equipment, the Invention Crew has designed a device that will help

Developed in 2007, COMPUGIRLS is an ITEST project that serves 60 girls in underserved school districts in the Phoenix-metro area. The girls, who are predominantly Hispanic, Native American and African-American, can begin the program as eighth graders and participate in six distinct courses, meeting four times a week for five weeks. In addition to advancing techno-social skills, they learn to improve their writing, conduct interviews, draft

The second year of the Connecticut Business & Industry Association's Education Foundation's Cyber-Challenge (also known as ITEST Project Opening Doors) places nearly 200 high-school students in teams to answer complex questions on health care, energy conservation, aerospace, and other issues posed by four of Connecticut's leading businesses. Industry representatives also serve as coaches and judges for the project.

Hosted by Pajaro Valley Unified School District, the Seeds of Change event was part party, part showcase for programs sponsored by the district and agencies, ranging from the YMCA to city Parks and Community Services. During this event, which mixed education activities and activities that were purely for fun, featured computer games developed by student participants in a project known locally as Watsonville TEC, but also known as the ITEST

Students who grow up in small, rural towns do not have the same exposure to high-tech jobs as their "big city" counterparts and may not be aware of what it takes to be a rocket scientist or video-game programmer, according to N.C. State University. With an increasing need for workers to fill STEM careers in the United States, educational researchers at N.C. State are finding ways to reach students at a time in their lives when research shows they

ITEST project Reach for the Sky brings innovative curricula and activities in STEM disciplines to the White Earth students over a five-week span. This program is particularly beneficial because it makes STEM culturally relevant to local Anishinaabe youth.

Visionaries like Glen Bull, a professor of instructional technology at the University of Virginia's (UVA) Curry School of Education, are using 3-D printing systems to change the way teachers present science concepts and, in turn, how students learn and retain the material. In a lab school, elementary school students and teachers are invited to use engineering design and fabrication to teach and learn science and math concepts.

The FabLab Classroom: Preparing Students for the Next Industrial Revolution in an ITEST project based in Virginia where elementary students and teachers have the opportunity to discover principles of design and fabrication. Principal investigator Glen Bull interviews with WHRV NPR's “With Good Reason” host Sarah McConnell to talk about this project.