A Passion for Teaching Leads to Engineering Change in Schools.

The article presents information about Ioannis Miaoulis, a teacher in Boston, Massachusetts. Eighteen years ago, Miaoulis took a wrong turn on his way to Tufts University, and ended up in the parking lot of a middle school outside Boston. Instead of asking for directions to the Medford, Massachusetts campus, where he was an assistant professor of mechanical engineering, Miaoulis walked into the principal's office and offered to demonstrate the principles of superconductivity, a hot field that he was exploring. One week later, Miaoulis was showing eighth grade students how a magnet could float in the air above a superconductor. That classroom session launched the Greek-born researcher on a parallel career in science education that has made him a passionate advocate for technological literacy. Disturbed by a curriculum that contained so much about flowers and rocks and nothing about planes and power plants, Miaoulis started a statewide campaign to introduce engineering concepts into schools. In 2001, Massachusetts education officials made their state the first to include engineering in its curricular standards and student assessments.