Today – March 14^th – marks International Pi Day – Pi (Greek letter “π”) is the symbol used in mathematics to represent a constant — the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter — which is approximately 3.14159…. and so on.  Pi has been calculated to over one trillion digits beyond its decimal point!

International Pi Day is a great time celebrate math and celebrate those who strive to introduce computer coding to all.  Not just because we think coding is fun (and it is once you get the hang of it,) but because there are over 2.4 million STEM jobs waiting to be filled by young and old alike.

“If more students and workers aren’t inspired to stick with STEM and coding, we will not have the millions of new workers needed [to make] our connected world a reality,” according to Time Magazine’s Tim Bajarin in his article How STEM Skills Are the Next Great Equalizer.

One university is leading the quest to inspire […]

by: Paula Golden, as seen in the Huffington Post

Opportunity is knocking for the next champion of the world’s longest-running, largest, most prestigious and most inclusive high school STEM competition to step forward: the International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) is up for grabs.

Deftly guided by the Society for Science and the Public for seventy years, science fair systems sponsored respectively by industry giants of their era – Westinghouse (from 1942 to 1997) and Intel (from 1998- the present) – are at the epicenter of virtually every state, national and international STEM education movement. Their renowned competitions, Science Talent Search, International Science and Engineering Fair and Broadcom MASTERS help drive our urgent imperative to educate disciplined, audacious STEM-literate adults at all levels of society who will fill millions upon millions of 21st century jobs that require flexible competencies in math, science and engineering.

Finalists from the Broadcom MASTERS […]

The “132005 Scottmcgregor” is not a large asteroid (it clocks in at about 2 to5 km in diameter), but it is big enough to cause similar damage as the one that is theorized to have killed off the dinosaurs about 65.5 million years ago.

Discovered by MIT Lincoln Laboratory’s Near-Earth Asteroid Research program (LINEAR), former Broadcom Chief Executive Officer and President, Scott McGregor, landed naming rights to the 132005 asteroid, a rocky space body that orbits the sun.

McGregor was honored with a celestial namesake by the Broadcom Foundation, Society for Science and the Public (SSP) and the CERES Connection to recognize his role in creating the Broadcom MASTERS science and engineering competition for middle school students, a program that marked its sixth anniversary last October.

The auspicious number of the asteroid assigned to McGregor coincides with the day he became President and CEO of Broadcom –132005 – January 3, 2005.

The official asteroid nomenclature states:

“Scott A. McGregor (b.1956), Broadcom CEO and Founding Chair of the Broadcom Foundation, championed the Broadcom MASTERS, […]

By: Paula Golden, President of Broadcom Foundation

At a post-mortem forum on the 2016 U.S. election, Mexico’s former president Vicente Fox had choice words for those who elected Donald Trump. Yearning for the manufacturing glory days of yesteryear, American workers were seduced by a sloganeer who promised to “Make America Great Again.” But, said Fox, the world has moved on, and their jobs with it. Instead of attending community colleges to pick up critical skills and proficiencies that would have enabled them to transition into jobs of the future, American workers “went home to down a few beers.”
A sardonic critique from a politician on the other side of Trump’s ‘great wall’ designed to keep jobs in and émigrés out?  Not so.

Donald Trump perpetuated the destructive myth about our nation’s infallibility held by many in Middle America, especially workers in Coal Country and the Rust Belt whose family fortunes rose in the 1950’s when the United States dominated manufacturing and production while other nations crawled out from under the rubble of World War II. Trump made them believe that the jobs in the factories and […]

By: Paula Golden, President of Broadcom Foundation

Chronicling the first 75 years of the Digital Revolution, Innovators author Walter Isaacson wrote, “it is teamwork, not rugged individualism that ignites groundbreaking innovation in science and technology.”

The Broadcom MASTERS^®, the premier national middle school competition organized by Society for Science & the Public, is a direct descendent of the Westinghouse Science Talent Search, which was founded toward the end of World War II when Isaacson’s story begins. The Westinghouse Science Talent Search was created in 1942 to nurture and elevate a generation of science and engineering innovators. Baby Boomers like me remember running in from backyard play on Friday evening to catch the official announcement of the science talent search winner on our black and white television.

When it was founded in 1942, STS competition awarded a prize to the “Top Boy” and “Top Girl.” Then inexplicably in 1948, the competition dropped these designated awards, and winners during the second half of the 20^th century […]