We have conducted an education project to communicate the wave energy concept to high school students. A virtual reality system that combines both hardware and software is developed in this project to simulate the buoy-wave interaction. This first-of-its-kind wave energy unit is portable and physics-based, allowing students to conduct a number of…

Project Lead the Way (PLTW) is a hands-on, project-based engineering curriculum for high school and middle school students, which has quadrupled annual enrollment in Texas in five years to over 23,000 students. The diversity of students participating has also increased dramatically. Using six years of longitudinally-linked student data, the…

Innovators and abstract thinkers--students who question why are going to be the future of engineering, of science and cures for diseases. Rarely do students ask where and how innovation is created. Students, particularly post-secondary students have lost their curiosity and they have lost their ability to question. Why? Because the relationship…

The following paper culminates a year of research conducted by researchers at E[superscript 3] Alliance and Texas State University and sponsored by the National Science Foundation. The following reports on promising practices observed and reported at Manor New Tech High School (MNTH), a Texas Science Technology Engineering Mathematics (T-STEM)…