Stories by Amanda Baker

Learning how to balance strategy, practice, programming and teamwork at robotics camp

Young participants in the GLOBE Program have collected more than 140 million data points in the last 20 years

Spending a week at animation academy got kids looking at one of their favorite hobbies from a brand new perspective

An unexpected marriage between socially engaged art and citizen science for youth outreach

Five days, 18 kids, nine robots and a whole lot of plastic bricks

Some ideas on how to add fun problem-solving and STEM challenges to an end-of-summer gathering

Fairgoers will find an all-new STEAM exhibit at this year's state fair.

Do you want to track local frog populations or photograph clouds for science? The young and curious kids you know can finish out the summer as citizen scientists

For three young women in Buffalo, a trip to the movies ultimately led to meeting an astronaut and sending an experiment into space

What sparked their curiosity, and what experiences threatened to put out that flame? The answers might be somewhat unexpected

Frontiers for Young Minds hosted its first live review event at the Chabot Space and Science Center as part of the Bay Area Science Festival. Researchers presented their work in 5-minute presentations, and then were questioned by a panel of Young Reviewers – ages 9-17 – in front of a live audience.

Creativity may not be a term that the average person would associate with DNA research or space exploration, but the youth science competition Genes in Space is showing students and teachers that the concepts actually go hand-in-hand. The competition introduces students to cutting-edge technology, asks them to propose real-world questions about the effects of space travel on living organisms, teams students up with science experts, and then performs the winning experiment on the International Space Station.

A recent flight with an empty water bottle gave me a new appreciation for the pressures that my ear drums deal with each time I fly. 

Imagine you have been plopped in the middle of a desert and asked to make a geologic map of the surrounding square mile over the next seven hours. What would you do? How would you start? Making decisions in this kind of setting depends on interpreting your surroundings enough to create working hypotheses that will help you decide where to go, when and what to look for once you get there

In the process of trying to design an article that did not feel like a textbook, we created an article that reminded kids of just that. It is easy to fall into the trap of thinking that knowing about your audience is the same as knowing what they actually like

Considering that ~65% of humans have trouble digesting lactose, one would think that the standard method for figuring out which products will or won't cause you days of pain would be more sophisticated than "give it a try."

  When news hit about the catastrophic floods in Chile last month, I was immediately brought back to my field seasons in the Atacama studying earthquakes.

A couple of weeks ago a wonderful hashtag was making its way around Twitter, with female scientists all over the world sharing photos of their feet to show a day #InMyShoes.

Have you ever been told not to play with your food? Perhaps been told that it isn’t polite or disrespects the other people at the table?

The internet is filled with claims about how we form initial assessments of other people within the first ten minutes - or even the first ten seconds - of meeting them.

Whether it is waiting to hear about draft picks or the next release by Apple, there are many things that make enthusiasts hold their breath.

Each year it seems a little less like science fiction to ask your phone for advice about local chinese food or trust your car to get you to a new location.

This post is the third in a three-part series highlighting youth science competitions that task young people with the real challenges and rewards of a life in research.