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Dr. Tirupalavanam Ganesh and his research team earned a $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to support a three-year ITEST project titled “Learning through Engineering Design and Practice: Using our Human Capital for an Equitable Future.” The project, which launched this fall in collaboration with the Mesa Unified School District, will provide 96 seventh-, eighth- and ninth-grade students from Powell and Carson junior high

About 50 middle school students and 20 teachers from New Hanover, Brunswick and Pender counties attended a workshop at UNCW. They primarily worked on a program called Squeak, free educational software that allows students to run simple animations to develop and model complex science experiments.

ITEST project Urban Ecology Institute supports science teachers with environmental curricula, materials and training. Of note, UEI’s focus on the needs of urban students and their teachers has led the organization to develop a curriculum on environmental justice and injustice: how power and poverty determine which communities suffer environmental hazards, and which do not.

ITEST project Reach for the Sky is doing more than connecting students to STEM—it has facilitated partnerships between three University colleges, University Extension, the White Earth Tribal College, three Reservation schools, and two businesses. This article highlights Reach for the Sky's program features.

The ITEST X-Tech program's goal is to foster critical thinking among its participants. Drawing from local, underserved populations, this program requires its participants to commit for two years, including summers--90% of participants stick with it.

HiGene, an ITEST project, brings to New Jersey high school students the chance to work in a rapidly advancing field, do original research, then publish their results and share them with the scientific community. Drawing on the fields of molecular biology and bioinformatics, five students from this project presented their most recent findings to an audience of scientists at the NSF headquarters in Arlington, VA.

Many teens pass the hours away from school playing video games, but through the ITEST Digispired ii program, students will explore science and engineering principles behind game controllers while learning programming tools to help create their own video games. Students will learn the concepts that make controllers, joysticks and dance pads work. The teens also will use computer programming language like C#, which will help them learn to use the

Watsonville High School freshmen Idzel Cano and Brianna Flores are students participating in “Tech Teach,” part of Watsonville TEC (also known as ITEST project Animando a Estudiantes con Technologia), as high school instructors who teach middle school students computer operation and webpage design. Years prior, as middle school students at Lakeview Elementary, Cano and Flores were part of an after school program called the Girl Game Company, in

As part of ITEST project Reach for the Sky, teams of 4th through 8th grade students are to launch eight spacecraft to the edge of outer space (“near-space" — the upper reaches of the atmosphere, above 80,000 feet). In about 30 experiments, the students will test science theories and apply hands-on science and math to their world.

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