U.S. News and World Report's Top Engineering Schools of 2012

U.S. News and World Report have released their rankings for the nation's top engineering graduate schools. MIT in Cambridge, MA tops the list. Second place went to Stanford University, followed by University of California   - Berkeley in third. The rankings are based on several factors including average GRE quantitative scores, research expenditures per faculty member, and overall acceptance rate.

The top 10 are as follows:

1. MIT (Cambridge, MA)
2. Stanford University (Stanford, CA)
3. University of California -- Berkeley (Berkeley, CA)
4. Georgia Institute of Technology (Atlanta, GA)
5. California Institute of Technology (Pasadena, CA)
6. University of Illinois -- Champaign/Urbana (Urbana, IL)
7. Carnegie Melon University (Pittsburgh, PA)
8. University of Michigan -- Ann Arbor (Ann Arbor, MI)
9. Cornell University (Ithaca, NY)
10. Purdue University -- West Lafayette (West Lafayette, IN)


To see the entire list of rankings, click HERE!

Ready to Rock-et!

Engineering for Kids has just launched a new contest in which kids (and kids at heart) are asked to channel their inner engineers to create a model rocket that's out of this world! The competition is called "Ready to Rocket" and will be taking photo submissions through the month of March.

Each entrant will receive an EFK t-shirt and their photos will be posted on the EFK Facebook page for a three-week voting process. The entry with the top votes will win its engineer a LEGO Mindstorms NXT 2.0, a computer programmable robot that transforms into 4 different modules.

The contest comes at the perfect time of year, when students on Spring Break will have an amazing project to work on and a prize to work towards. We're very excited to see what our fans come up with.

To LIKE the Facebook page and enter the contest, click HERE and be sure to share the news with the young engineers in your life.

February 17th Begins National Engineers Week!

The third full week of February is National Engineers Week! Started in 1951 by the National Society of Professional Engineers, this week is observed by more than 79 engineering, educational, and cultural societies along with more than 50 corporations and government agencies. The week is scheduled to coincide with the birthday of President George Washington, whom many consider the nation's first engineer (likely due to his extensive survey work).

Within the week falls the award for Federal Engineer of the Year, recognizing technical excellence, publications, leadership, and community service. The speaker at this year's awards ceremony will be Dr. Regina M. Benjamin, U.S. Surgeon General. Many of the finalists for this year are in the armed forces, and we salute them all as winners for their service to our country and dedication to the field of engineering.

Thursday is a special spotlight of the week, National Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day. Engineering for Kids founder Dori Roberts was recently interviewed by MarieClaire.com on the future of women in engineering. To read that article, click HERE. We encourage you to introduce a girl to engineering as well! Check out our website to get more information on classes near you at enginerringforkids.net.

Engineering for Kids iPad Sweepstakes

Engineering for Kids recently finished their FREE iPad Sweepstakes which gave away a new iPad Mini to one lucky fan. To enter the contest, one simply had to "Like" EFK's Facebook page and enter their contact information. Then, a winner was drawn at random. The contest ran for several months during the start-up growth of the Engineering for Kids social media presence to match their booming success in the franchise industry!

The Engineering for Kids iPad Sweepstakes winner was Samantha Lautenschlager from Fredericksburg, VA. As many contest winners are, Samantha was hesitant at first to believe she had actually won, but was thrilled when the EFK team assured her this was no joke! Pictured here are Samantha's two boys and Engineering for Kids founder Dori Roberts with the prize. We can bet a lot of learning is going to be done on their new technology! Perhaps we have some future engineers on our hands. 

Check out the Engineering for Kids Facebook page HERE to stay up to date on future contests and giveaways! 

High School Students Giving Up on STEM

The U.S. NEWS published an article yesterday that reports high school students are giving up on STEM careers. Though interest has been increasing in the past decade (1 in 4 students report an interest in a STEM major or career) and they begin high school with the interest in engineering and other sciences, it is argued that not enough is being done to maintain an interest in STEM.

A suggestion to remedy the situation is to improve student achievement by implementing new k-12 education standards in science in math and to fill them with an interest in STEM before high school. Some states have begun specialized STEM high schools, but it is also suggested that schools must partner with other educators and businesses in the STEM fields. Otherwise, the increasing jobs in the field will continue to go unfilled.

And that's exactly what Engineering for Kids is trying to do: create an interest early and maintain it through the future.

Being reading the U.S. NEWS article below or click HERE.

Many High Schoolers Giving Up on STEM

By MICHAEL MORELLA

High school students aren't sticking with STEM. Even though the number of jobs in science and engineering is expected to surge in the years to come, close to 60 percent of the nation's students who begin high school interested in science, technology, engineering, and math, or STEM, change their minds by graduation, according to a report released Wednesday from STEMconnector and college planning service My College Options.

Overall student interest has been gradually climbing for about a decade, with about 1 in 4 of all high schoolers excited about pursuing a STEM major or career. But keeping many of those students attracted to such subjects is proving a challenge. "Tying education to the workforce needs is critical to the future of the nation," said STEMconnector CEO Edie Fraser at a town hall event Wednesday announcing the release of the report. Science and engineering careers are expected to grow more than 20 percent by 2018, twice the rate of the overall U.S. labor force.

Engineering for Kids featured in Huffington Post

Dori Roberts, founder of Engineering for Kids, recently wrote an article for the Huffington Post's Blog online. She spoke about the importance of STEM education, her history in teaching, and her dedication to inspiring young adults to explore careers in engineering. Roberts cites an interesting study by the Intel Corporation which reports that 63% of teens have never considered a career in engineering, but 44% would if they knew more about it!

Click HERE for the full article, or begin reading below.

Creating, Tinkering, Inventing and Imagining Our Way to the Top

By: Dori Roberts

If you were to peek through the door of most preschool classrooms or observe young children playing at home, you would likely find kids creating, tinkering, inventing and imagining. Their hands would be busy and their minds would be racing a hundred miles a minute with all different types of creative possibilities: A rollercoaster using foam pipe insulation! A rocket from a plastic water bottle! A bridge from paper and tape! These kids are engineers. Most just don't know it. Yet.

I began my career as a high school technology and engineering teacher. During that time, I witnessed amazing ideas high school students developed and implemented around engineering-related challenges. I saw firsthand how students could begin to address real-world problems with their innovation. My own son, who was 6 at the time, became very interested in the students' projects. Upon searching for an after-school STEM program for him, I realized such a thing did not exist. So, I began to dream of a program that would introduce STEM concepts to young children. In 2009, I founded Engineering for Kids, which brings science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) to kids ages 4 through 14 in a fun and challenging way.

Engineering For Kids featured on MarieClaire.com

The article showcased Engineering for Kids' founder Dori Robert's background and concept inception story.  The article included research about females working in different industries to show the impact female engineers can make in the future.  In addition, the story included franchising information and how many locations are planned in 2013.

Where Our Future Female Engineers Are
By Kate Schweitzer

Who runs the world? If you were to ask, say, Beyoncé, it's an emphatic "GIRLS!" And she's right. Women have made incredible strides in the workplace in the past 50 years, and the fairer sex has even broken down the barriers of many historically male-dominated fields, like law and business. For instance, this was a record-breaking year for the Fortune 500, with 18 female CEOs now running the nation's largest corporations, up from 12 in 2011. The same growing trend exists in medicine, where now nearly half of all first-year medical students are women.

Unfortunately, the same can't be said for the rise in female scientists and engineers. Of recent college graduates earning an engineering degree, only 17 percent were female, which happened to be a 15-year low. The field is yet to be run by girls, but one women is trying to do something about it.

Dori Roberts is the founder of Engineering for Kids, a Virginia-based franchise that offers after-school programs, summer camps, and field trips to help children — with a special focus on girls — develop math and science skills. We spoke to Roberts, 38, about starting her own business and finding new ways to bring the engineering field to the kids' table.



Click here to read the entire article.