By Anne Hardy, Mercury News
For years now, accepted wisdom has held that, as the West loses manufacturing jobs, we will keep our economies growing by leveraging our substantial advantages in technology and education. If you attended the Tech Challenge last month at San Jose’s Tech Museum of Innovation, you might be tempted to believe that our future is assured. The event involved more than 1,200 middle- and high-school students in a raucous competition to devise ways to attach thruster rockets to a disabled satellite. The ingenuity of 260 teams produced solutions ranging from the methodical to the brilliant, from the whimsical to the near-maniacal. One group of kids devised a small-scale trebuchet; others deployed motorized balloons.
http://www.mercurynews.com/opinion/ci_15119734?nclick_check=1
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