I love STEM events. Students huddling around chemistry experiments, buzzing machines, and the buzzing of learning makes me giddy; all of these bright young minds are going to be our future, and, with our help, our legacy as STEM professionals.

More than 100 middle school students eagerly watched machines run, listened to technical explanations of how things worked, applied their math skills to engineering demonstrations, and got to meet with engineers, machinists, and other leaders.  What made this group is unique is their gender – they were all female.

Robots are cool. When I was a kid R2-D2 and Rosie were fabrications of a fantastic, future-like world. Now, BB-8 and Beamo are incredibly close to reality.