President Obama hosts students and their science fair projects at the White House
DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.0202
According to a brief report inside the front section of the 8 February New York Times , “President Obama converted the White House into a science fair [the day before], announcing new federal and private-sector initiatives to encourage ‘a nation of tinkerers and dreamers’ in science, technology, engineering and math.” A nearly identical blurb appeared online.
As shown on ABC’s evening news and in a half-minute clip available at Politico, the president tested one project with its young creator, using a bicycle pump to supply compressed air that propelled a marshmallow across the State Dining Room. ABC offers the full minute-and-a-half clip online.
All of that was presented somewhat whimsically, but Cynthia Gordy of the Washington Post‘s magazine The Root—which calls itself “the leading online source of news and commentary from an African-American perspective"—gave the story more than just a brief, cheery-faced blurb’s worth of ink. According to her article , the president addressed an audience of students, teachers, and prominent science professionals, including NASA administrator Charles Bolden, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lisa Jackson, and Bill Nye the Science Guy. Obama called for young inventors and researchers to be given as much attention as athletes.
Gordy also reported some funding figures:
[The president] also announced a new $22 million fund from businesses and philanthropic organizations, including Google and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, to help train 100,000 new math and science teachers. The president’s upcoming budget will invest an additional $80 million for STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) teacher-preparation programs.
“Traditional table settings,” Gordy wrote, “made way for displays including a mind-controlled robotic arm, solar panels modeled after tree limbs to more efficiently collect energy, a helmet designed to protect soldiers from traumatic brain injuries and model rockets—all from student winners of science competitions across the country.”
The president saw 100 elementary and high school projects. Gordy cited examples including that of “eighth-graders from Monroeville, Ala., who designed and built an award-winning, insect-catching robot as part of the Friends of BEST program, which works to expand STEM-education opportunities in the Alabama Black Belt.”
Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.