By Jason Weinstein.

Inspiring the next generation of scientists and engineers takes creative teaching today.


More than 300 teachers from 200 districts throughout the state were in downtown Binghamton to attend the Project Lead the Way conference. The annual event helps teachers improve the way they teach STEM - or science, technology, engineering, and math - to students. Among the topics Wednesday: engineering, robotics, and biomedical science. One key is to present the material as solutions to real-life problems.


"What it does is it makes the math and science somewhat subversive. They don't think that they're learning the math but as they're programming the robot or as they're working on an engineering problem to see if this bridge can support a certain amount of weight, that is all math, it's all the physics," said Carol Malstrom, Senior Director of Project Lead the Way.


Malstrom says there is a particular lack of qualified workers in the field of computer science, for both programmers and computational thinkers.