Hi, Until recently, I published beanz, the kids computing magazine. I want to give you an update with a few options. Unfortunately, after 11 years of publishing, I hit my limits for funding the magazine with business debt and my personal savings. I had to stop publication of the print magazine. As a prior active subscriber, I have added you to our magazine website with 1200+ STEM articles. I also have added you to an email newsletter that will carry on most of what beanz did: provide STEM/STEAM information for kids, parents, teachers, and librarians. Instead of six issues a year, the newslette ..read more

Artificial intelligence (AI) is shaping up to become a defining feature of our daily lives, both online and IRL. I figured it would be a great time to chat with my friend Smera Jayadeva, a research assistant working on Data Justice and Global Ethical Futures at the Alan Turing Institute in the United Kingdom (UK). I asked Smera about how AI is evolving and how young people can be involved/affected by this evolution.  Ethan: How do you see AI technology shaping the future of education and learning for young people? Smera: With rapid advances in generative AI, such as ChatGPT and similar ch ..read more

Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA) experiences were huge in the 1980s. Kids could read these entertaining books and, depending on the choices they made during the story, could experience over 25 different endings. Today, CYOA experiences are available on streaming services. As a coder, you can program your own CYOA game in Python using functions. You may already know what a function is. In Python, user-created sequences of commands are called functions. In Scratch, you can create reusable blocks of code, called My Blocks, that can be called on to run as needed. In both languages, functions are p ..read more

Imagine finding a way to use social media posts to save endangered coral reefs. Scientists from Brazil just might have done it. All it takes is a simple photograph to help on a mission to save thousands of marine species. Coral reefs are habitats for diverse organisms that live in harmony at the bottom of the ocean. They also serve as shelter and food for many other animals that live in the sea. Unfortunately, it is nothing new that global warming and the rise of ocean temperatures are causing many of these barriers to disappear and putting species at risk of extinction. It’s difficult for sci ..read more

Minecraft is awesome for making a new world in a flash; just start a new game and a world is generated, right there and then. But because algorithms dictate the world in Minecraft, there’s a limit to the number of biomes and land shapes it can generate. If you play a lot (and we mean a lot!) you’ll eventually start recognizing what parts were generated and how. Fortunately, you can add a bit of spice to your next world with world gen mods. These mods are tailored to adjust how Minecraft generates worlds, adding new things that the default game can’t do. Each world generation mod adds different ..read more

With climate change on the agenda, many companies are looking for alternative fuel options that don’t harm the environment. The high levels of CO2 that traditional fuels emit into the atmosphere are among the biggest villains in the fight against global warming. With this in mind, a group of teenagers in Brazil created a biofuel that reuses cooking oil to fuel vehicles. Five girls from a public school in the interior of Paraná in southern Brazil got together to create an eco-friendly and accessible alternative to take them to school. With used oil—that’s right, the one your parents use to cook ..read more

Have you ever wondered what the first robot was like? Given the surprising amount of history about robots and the many different ways to define the concept, it can be hard to decide which one came first. However, if we’re going by the definition that a robot is something you can program to do a task by itself, then there’s an easy answer and it is called the Unimate. Invented back in 1961, the Unimate was simply an arm that could pick up and move things around by itself. Sounds boring, right? Remember, though, this is the first robot that you could program to move on its own. Before Unimate, t ..read more

You may have played some racing games in which the game designer made a track, and you try to get around it as fast as you can. Today, let’s do the opposite: you make the track, and see how fast a computer-controlled turtle can zoom around it.  This program runs in Mini Micro, a free app you can download from https:// miniscript.org/MiniMicro. Launch that, then type edit and press Return or Enter to open the code editor. Carefully type in Listing 1 below.   When you’re done, click the Save button (the second button from the left at the top of the editor), and save it as “turtleR ..read more

Recently we looked at how model rockets work and what’s involved in flying them. But the real fun is in building your very own model rocket from a kit. Starting with a basic kit is an excellent idea as the building methods you learn and use will also apply to bigger kits or to designing scratch-built models. The rocket kit we have chosen is the Estes “Green Eggs”. This is a reasonably large model rocket as it is designed to launch with an egg in the payload bay. Egg lofting in rocketry is a fun competition in which the egg has to survive the journey for the flight to count. The kit arrives in ..read more

It is estimated that 92 million tonnes of textile waste is produced worldwide every year, the equivalent of a rubbish truck full of clothes sent to landfill every second. While reducing the amount of clothing we buy is arguably the best way to combat this problem, scientists across the world are also working on ways to deal with textile waste.  Converting Clothes into Paint Pigment Scientists at Deakin University in Geelong, Australia, have developed a method for converting old clothing into paint pigment.  Using existing mill machinery from agriculture and mining, the wast ..read more