From Angry Birds to roller coasters, from the Harry Potter films
to viral YouTube explosions of Diet Coke and Mentos, your summer
fun is made possible by science, technology, engineering, and
math. But the STEM subjects, as they're known, are in serious
need of a public relations overhaul. Somehow they've gotten a
bad rep among students for being "boring." And grown-ups who
should know better often think of them as "uncreative."
Ludicrous. People who have studied and work in STEM subjects are
responsible for much of our modern amusement, communication,
health, and progress. They invent and make the stuff we love.
They improve our lives. They do cool stuff. They imagine the
future and build it. Carter Emmart, for example, takes the data
collected from the most sophisticated telescopes and turns it
into wild visuals that make the audiences at the Hayden
Planetarium's space shows feel like they are traveling through
space and time. "My job is to translate the difficulty of
science into understandable stories," s