STEMvisions Blog

Editor's Note: This post was written for Computer Science Education Week. Learn more about Computer Science Education Week and how you can get involved here. 

Video games provide exciting and entertaining experiences for millions of people around the world. The production of video games is now bigger than those of film and music—and growing each year. If you’re interested in designing and developing your own games, there’s never been a better time to start learning! There are now many learning opportunities available for students and teachers online.

The video game development process begins with programming. 

100&Change is a MacArthur Foundation competition for a $100 million grant to fund a single proposal that will make measurable progress toward solving a significant problem. 

Watch the Smithsonian's proposal below! 

If you live in a rural area, or near a park, you’ve probably observed this unique squirrel behavior. When the weather catches a chill, these bushy-tailed creatures begin what looks like preparation for a wide-scale scavenger hunt. In great numbers, these squirrels begin to bury nuts! Squirrels hide nuts this way as preparation for cold weather when otherwise food will be scarce. This kind of proactive stashing raises a lot of questions for squirrel enthusiasts—the most pressing being how do the squirrels find their nuts again?

It’s been just over 110 years since Einstein published his groundbreaking papers in 1905 that revolutionized physics as we know it and ushered in the quantum age. Among these papers were his theories on special relativity (not to be confused with general relativity, which he published 10 years later in 1915). His theories on special relativity discussed such strange things as length contraction and time dilation when an observer moved at speeds approaching the speed of light (3 x 10⁸ meters per second, or c).

Fall 2016 National Advisoary Board Meeting

The Smithsonian Science Education Center held its fall national advisory board events which included a materials center tour, board dinner and board meeting in the Raleigh-Durham area of North Carolina, one of the states where SSEC tested the efficacy of its Leadership and Assistance for Science Education Reform (LASER) model. The tour was held on Monday, October 17th at the Johnston county industries materials center (JCI) in Selma, NC.