How dirt biking gives black youth a shot at STEM opportunities

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This post is part of Mashable’s ongoing series The Women Fixing STEM, which highlights trailblazing women in science, tech, engineering, and math, as well as initiatives and organizations working to close the industries’ gender gaps.

Kamiya Jordan is a soft-spoken 12-year-old who looks fierce when gripping the handlebars of a dirt bike. You might actually one day glimpse Kamiya’s likeness in the form of a statue, her defiant gaze staring back at onlookers who’ve come to see the work of art that’s replaced one of four Confederate monuments Baltimore mayor Catherine Pugh had removed in 2017.

Kamiya became the model for the planned 3D-printed, 15-foot statue thanks to Brittany Young, a 29-year-old engineer and social entrepreneur who founded B-360, a social enterprise that gives children an opportunity to develop STEM skills by tapping into a shared obsession: urban dirt bike riding. Read more…

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Google’s Emma Haruka Iwao breaks Pi world record

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The world record for most accurate value of pi has been broken. Emma Haruka Iwao, who has worked at Google for nearly four years, found the new digits of pi by using the company’s cloud computing service. She managed to calculate pi to 31 trillion digits. Read more…

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What it takes to teach the next STEM generation

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It’s 12:09 p.m. at Buena Vista Horace Mann school in San Francisco’s Mission district

Laura Ramirez, a curriculum technology integration specialist, is waiting for 14 girls to stream into her classroom. She’s laid out old Dell CPUs alongside tool kits that contain screwdrivers, Allen wrenches, and pliers. The girls’ job today is to carefully open the computers, explore and label the components, and then put the hardware back together again.

The girls, who are in 6th, 7th, and 8th grade, arrive and place their backpacks into cubbies. They’re here for Tech Chicxs, a club Ramirez founded to encourage girls at the K-8 school to explore science, technology, engineering, and math. Approximately 80 percent of the school’s students are Hispanic or Latino, and Ramirez is particularly set on engaging girls who are rarely represented in Silicon Valley and the broader tech industry.  Read more…

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WashU announces donation from Square co-founder to grow engineering school

Washington University in St. Louis (WashU) announced today that its engineering school received its largest single donation in history. The donation was offered by Square co-founder and WashU alumni Jim McKelvey, for whom the school will be renamed, from the School of Engineering & Applied Science to The James McKelvey School of Engineering. WashU did […]

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pi-top’s latest edtech tool doubles down on maker culture

London-based edtech startup, pi-top, has unboxed a new flagship learn-to-code product, demoing the “go anywhere” Pi-powered computer at the Bett Show education fare in London today. Discussing the product with TechCrunch ahead of launch, co-founder and CEO Jesse Lozano talked up the skills the company hopes students in the target 12-to-17 age range will develop and […]

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The ultimate guide to gifting STEM toys: tons of ideas for little builders

The holiday season is here again, touting all sorts of kids’ toys that pledge to pack ‘STEM smarts’ in the box, not just the usual battery-based fun. Educational playthings are nothing new, of course. But, in recent years, long time toymakers and a flurry of new market entrants have piggybacked on the popularity of smartphones […]

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The hackers getting paid to keep the internet safe

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This post is part of Mashable’s ongoing series The Women Fixing STEM, which highlights trailblazing women in science, tech, engineering, and math, as well as initiatives and organizations working to close the industries’ gender gaps.


It had taken a month of work, but Jesse Kinser had finally hit the jackpot. The security researcher had managed to pull off quite a feat — stealing the source code for more than 10,000 different websites, including a big four consulting company — and the ramifications of her find were staggering. 

But contrary to many people’s perceptions of shadowy hackers, her next move wasn’t trading the data on the dark web, or crafting exploits to sell to the highest bidder. Rather, she was faced with a different sort of daunting task: developing a responsible disclosure process to notify the thousands of vulnerable companies she’d just pwned. That’s right, after accessing all that code, her next job was to let the victims know exactly how she’d done it — and how they could stop someone with a different set of moral guideposts from doing the same.  Read more…

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What do a former Victoria’s Secret model and an Indy racer have in common? — Mashable Originals

Modeling, racing, and coding. What do they have in common? Well, 4-H is a community trying to get kids excited about coding by teaching them how to animate their own names, with the help of prominent figures. We went to check out their National Youth …

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