The K12 Engineering Education Podcast

Robert Monroe talks about the Cast in Steel college metal casting competition, now viewable in a digital show following student teams’ stories. Related to this episode: Cast in Steel on Episode 1 premiere: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9nrlzGLOmk YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@CastinSteel TV show page: https://www.castinsteel.net/tv-show Steel Founders’ Society of America: https://ww...

Modern robotics can interact with the human body in newer, innovative ways, using flexible materials and compliant actuators. Dr. Holly Golecki, Ph. D., wants to teach young people all about it, recently sharing her team’s K-12 curriculum in soft robotics in The Science Teacher magazine. A professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Dr. Golecki teaches bioengineering and engineeri...

Cultivated meat has the potential to disrupt the meat industry, and engineer Dr. Katie Kam joins the podcast to talk about it. Katie founded BioBQ, her startup that’s developing cultivated beef brisket. She explains how cultivated meat – also known as “cultured meat” or “lab meat” – is real meat that avoids animal slaughter by being grown in a bioreactor. Katie discusses her motivation for her wor...

The Solve for Tomorrow design competition from Samsung is starting up again, and three guests join the podcast to explain how it works, and why schools and businesses should invest in K-12 STEM education. George Dowdy led his students at Porter High School to win the most recent competition, while Autumn Dowdy led her students at the same school to win before that. George and Autumn, an engineerin...

Amy Pirzada started My Coding Place as an educational business focused on teaching coding to kids in Austin. But she soon expanded to teach chess, game design, 3D modeling, 3D printing, and more technical topics in problem-solving to wider audiences. She talks about the mission of her entrepreneurial business, how to teach kids programming effectively, the right tech tools for teaching kids of dif...

The Physics Circus at The University of Texas at Austin tries to attract kids to science using loud and entertaining demonstrations that might not be as accessible to the average school. Led by graduate students doing the latest in physics research, The Physics Circus is getting back into live shows again. Joseph Ziegel is one of the coordinators of the group, along with Jordan Zesch, and Joseph d...

Do scientific research articles sometimes sound like another language? To K-12 students, very often it’s yes. Tanya Dimitrova tried to help solve this problem by founding the Scientific Journal for Kids, where her team of writers, designers, and teachers translates articles from scientific research journals into more kid-friendly language. Tanya talks about how her time as a science teacher in Cen...

What is synthetic biology? Researcher and professor Dr. Xiaojing Gao introduces this cutting edge field. He explains how his lab at Stanford University engineers biomolecular circuits, which are meant to be programmable, reproducible, and friendlier to mammalian cells than non-biological molecules. Xiaojing hopes to create the building blocks of this technology, to one day better treat all sorts o...

Learning in robotics doesn’t have to take weeks, if you can design, build, and test a robot in hours in a video game. Dan White, CEO of Filament Games, introduces RoboCo, their game meant to teach principles of robotics to players, from the mechanical design all the way to testing in the 3D world. Dan discusses cofounding Filament Games with partners Dan Norton and Alex Stone, what constitutes a g...

Chicago educator and entrepreneur Scott Steward breaks down his teaching philosophy, rooted in getting to know his students. Steward founded Genius Lab in Chicago, where he teaches young people technology, business, and how to become an adult. He honed his curriculum from teaching in Chicago Public Schools classrooms for fifteen years in largely black and brown communities. First Steward traces hi...

The Robotics Education and Competition (REC) Foundation has been running robotics programs for youth for years, including the widespread global competitions sponsored by VEX Robotics. Dan Mantz is the CEO of the REC Foundation, leading this nonprofit through the pandemic, after previously working in industrial engineering and robotics for over twenty years. He talks about the REC Foundation’s miss...

Math is fundamental to engineering education and other disciplines. That’s part of why Richard Rusczyk wants to teach kids harder math than they often see in school. As the CEO of Art of Problem Solving, he wants to challenge more young people mathematically, hopefully giving them an earlier chance to achieve math mastery. He talks about national math competition culture compared to sports culture...

Kids can learn CAD for 3D printing, but teaching it doesn’t have to be a hassle. David Seto and Michael Welch wrote a set of books to make teaching and learning the subject easier. They based it on their own experiences with 3D printing, learning it as beginners, coming from finance and mobile games industries, and then teaching CAD for 3D printing in after-school programs in Hong Kong and the USA...

Mechanical engineer Dr. Ada-Rhodes Short studies robot brains, having previously worked in industry and academia for commercial toy companies, NASA, Texas A&M, and more. She also advocates for diversity and inclusion in education and STEM for trans people, including her time founding the Sexual Identity Forum at Baylor University. Dr. Short talks about one of her latest projects finding trans wome...

The Silicon Valley Education Foundation (SVEF) is a nonprofit running several programs in K-12 STEM education, including its Computer Science Institute for middle and high school teachers. Rosemary Kamei is the Chief Development and Innovation Officer of SVEF, and she talks about why SVEF piloted its CS Institute a few years ago and how it has been going through the pandemic. She talks about how i...

The pandemic has spurred teachers like Amanda Hough to teach CAD remotely, but how do you do that if students don’t have the hardware to run resource-heavy CAD software? Amanda uses cloud-based CAD platform OnShape, and her students run it in a web browser, no installs needed. She talks about her experience switching over to OnShape this year, its place in education even when the pandemic is over,...

STEM curriculum specialist Dr. Corey Hall shares tips and resources for teaching engineering effectively at the K-12 level in 2021, both during and beyond COVID. Corey recommends teaching strategies and products based on her 24 years of experience in education, as a school librarian, middle school teacher, professor, and online teacher. She discusses 3D printing, lending libraries, virtual cloud-b...

The education system can change top-down, or bottom-up. Author Suzanne DeMallie wrote “Can You Hear Me Now?” – a book about how parents and teachers might change our schools from the bottom-up. She draws on her own experiences in Baltimore County Public Schools as an elementary math teacher from 2011 to 2019, a parent of children in BCPS, and an advocate for sound enhancement technology in classro...

LEDs, or light-emitting diodes, have changed the world – and continue to do so. This energy-efficient electronics technology came from decades of design and discovery in engineering. Dr. Russell Dupuis is one of the engineers behind LEDs, and he recently was one of five winners of the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering for his work in this technology. Dr. Dupuis explains his contribution to cre...

How do you learn web development without a computer, or without any electronic device? Sam Taylor wrote a book to help learners do just that. As a former middle school teacher and current tech worker, Sam wrote the newly released educational book titled The Coding Workbook, which intends to teach the basics of HTML and CSS, but with no computer required. Hear the discussion about this new book, ac...

Mishaal Ashemimry is an aerospace engineer and pilot who, after working for major aerospace organizations, formed her own aerospace startup to design rockets for small, low-Earth orbit satellites. As a Saudi American, she got interested in the stars when she was young, looking up at the sky while visiting Saudi Arabia. She describes many parts of her path in this career, including love of math, st...

Let’s make equations musical. Instead of visualizing equations on a graph, let’s listen to them on the piano, merging all our math and music knowledge. You can make two-dimensional x-y math equations audible – or sonify them – by translating the x-values to time and the y-values to the keys of a piano. If you can’t play them on the piano yourself, we can use the free web app Chordinates! by Pios L...

Army Futures Command (AFC) is partnering with Austin Community College (ACC) in Texas to create a new Software Factory, which will be a software development training program for Army soldiers. Planned to start in January, it will blend training of both soldiers and civilians in newer tech practices in agile development. Maj. Vito Errico from AFC will co-lead the Software Factory, and he joins the...

Schools have reopened in Fall 2020 amid the COVID19 pandemic, and educators are putting in overtime to make it work. Four educators speak about their experiences getting students learning again either online or in person: Superintendent Teddy Clevinger in Bell County, Texas; engineering entrepreneurship teacher Melanie Kong in Seattle, Washington; science and engineering teacher Amy Morriss in New...

How do you make an audio-based course to teach science topics to kids? Podcast creator, teacher, and musician Marshall Escamilla explains. Marshall is a co-creator of the highly rated Tumble Science Podcast for Kids. He drew on his podcasting experience and his years in the classroom to develop a “podcourse” for Himalaya Learning, focused on exploring the living things inside kids’ homes. In this...