Is STEM Education Dead?

The global society needs more STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics) students than we are producing today.  How do we interest our children in the STEM subjects and change the future?  The biggest challenge is to make STEM relevant and personal to the student.  How do we do this?  Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Stephen Hawking communicate at the popular level extremely well.  How do they do it and how can we adapt our message for our students? Telling a story where the students can identify with the subject helps ignite their interest.  Sometimes the subject might be what is currently in the popular experience, such as the recent best-selling book and movie ”The Martian”, or it might be climate change where a comparison of the environment of today is made with what it was like in the Cretaceous. We’ll look at these two examples and some others as examples of “telling the story”.