It is always fun when serious people offer a confessional.
On Microsoft's Bing blog, director Stefan Weitz decides to tell everyone who will listen that he has been an "avid rocket launcher since 1975."
I am not aware what effect this might have had on his parents, his neighbors, or the local police and fire services as he was growing up, but I can find no evidence that he was ever arrested for such avid launching.
Weitz is now, however, vexed that science is not cool in school.
So he and his friends at the Bingdome have decided to revive child enthusiasm for launching.
Please welcome Mission: 10,000 Rockets, a program designed to get your kids to design rockets that will successfully immolate beyond ashes several countries of which we have not become fond.
No, wait. I haven't got that quite right.
Perhaps something like this will be useful for a trip to the planet Titan?
(Credit: CC Erik Charlton/Flickr)Mission: 10000 Rockets is, in fact, asking kids to imagine what the next generation of space travel might look like. If you can get your kids to walk away from their Grand Theft Auto and design the rockets of the future, they might get their creations actually built.
No, not to full size, but at least they will be brought to physical being by some "cool artists" whose work might just be worth a fortune one day.
A book of all the designs will also be produced, all the proceeds from which will be returned to schools. And eight extremely fortunate schools will receive $5,000 to fund scientific projects in their cash-strapped establishments.
As a recent job advertisement for an astronaut in the Calgary edition of Craigslist proved, there is a renewed enthusiasm in the space project, some of it no doubt engendered by the very real prospect that our own world will shortly disintegrate.
So what better way to make your children productive this weekend than by getting them to design a spacecraft that might, one day, preserve a little humanity for the residents of the Planet Titan to marvel at?
Microsoft, Intel, and Cisco plan to announce Tuesday that they are working together to help ensure that proper standards are created for measuring digital literacy.
Microsoft VP Anoop Gupta
(Credit: Microsoft)The three companies aren't coming up with the assessment criteria themselves, but rather bringing together a group of education leaders and academics to identify the characteristics that should form the basis of global standards.
While such standards have emerged for math and science, they are also needed for other kinds of 21st century skills, Microsoft Vice President Anoop Gupta said in an interview last week.
To head the effort, the troika has tapped professor Barry McGaw, currently the director of the Melbourne Education Research Institute at the University of Melbourne, to serve as the project's executive director.
Gupta, who heads Microsoft's emerging markets effort, said that although leading companies are often advocating for similar education reforms, their work is often done solo.
"Today we often speak in different voices," Gupta said in an interview last week. "That confuses the decision makers."
Microsoft itself has been pouring millions into its emerging markets programs, including its Partners in Learning effort. Gupta said education remains a focus for Microsoft, but declined to say whether any cuts in his budget were looming amid the troubled economy.
"Certainly for us, like any company,...we are evaluating," he said. "We are being wise in how we manage the spend."
Overall, he said, there should be more dollars heading to education, particularly in the United States, where incoming president Barack Obama has outlined plans for major spending on infrastructure, including schools.
"Then, in fact, when we emerge out of this, suddenly the schools are truly wired for broadband," Gupta said.
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