Very interesting statistics!

The world's hottest place: Death Valley National Park
The highest air temperature ever recorded on Earth was 134 degrees Fahrenheit, at Death Valley National Park on July 10, 1913.

 

The world's coldest place: East Antarctic Plateau
On the high ridge of the East Antarctic Plateau, the temperature can drop to as low as -135.8 degrees Fahrenheit,recorded in August, 2010.

 

World's most populated city: Shanghai
At a whopping 24,150,000 permanent inhabitants, Shanghai is the single city that is home to the most people in the world.

 

World's least populated city: Vatican City
With a paltry population of 842, the city-state of Vatican City is the smallest city and state in the world.

 

World's wealthiest city: Tokyo
That tower might as well be made of gold, since Tokyo tops the charts with a GDP of $1,520 billion (only beating New York by a mere $310 billion).

 

World's poorest city: Kinshasa
Kinshasa is probably the poorest city in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the poorest country in the world, at a GDP of $55 billion. Many of its residents live on less $1 a day.

 

Highest point in the world: Mount Everest
Towering 29,029 feet in the air, the top of Mount Everest is the closest you can get to touching space, while still standing on Earth.

 

Lowest point in the world: Challenger Deep
The lowest known natural point in the world is Challenger Deep, 35,797 ft below sea level at the bottom of the Mariana Trench.  Only three people have ever made it to the bottom, one of which was filmmaker James Cameron.
 

Most photographed place: The Guggenheim
Photos have always told stories, but in today's world of cell phone cameras and social media, that story is relayed as data to companies who monitor everything we do. Geotagged data was culled by Sightsmap using a Google-based image sharing software, and can now show us the most photographed places in the world, right down to the landmark. The Winner? The Guggenheim in New York.

 

The world's most popular country: Germany
The results of the annual BBC World Country Rating Poll are in, and Germany came out on top as the most positively viewed country in the world among people probably under the age of 85 (at a 59% positivity rating).

 

The wettest spot on Earth: Mawsynram, India
Rainwise, anyway. In Mawsynram, India, it rains an average of 467.35 inches per year, and with a record of 1000 inches in 1985.

 

The driest spot on Earth: The Atacama Desert
The 600 miles of South America's Atacama desert is the driest place on Earth, no contest.  The Desert sees an average of 4 inches of rain every thousand years. Yes, you read that right.

 

Sunniest Place on Earth: Yuma, Arizona
In Yuma, Arizona, the sun shines for an average of 11 hours a day. Its forecast is sun for 90 percent of the year,averaging a total of 4015 daylight hours a year.

 

Most expensive city to live in: Singapore
The new champion of the world, Singapore has recently beat out Tokyo for the title of "most expensive city" for 2014.
Cars can cost between 4-6 times in Singapore what they cost in the US or UK (for example, a Toyota Prius actuallycosts about $150,000.00 there).


Least expensive city to live in: Mumbai, India
At the other end of the spectrum, Mumbai, India, is the cheapest place to live in the world, according to the Worldwide Cost of Living Index 2014. For some perspective, a loaf of bread that would cost $3.36 in Singapore, would only cost $0.91 in Mumbai.

 

Country that consumes the most food: United States
I suppose there must be a reason why Americans have a food-related reputation when it comes to other countries: we eat an average of 3,770 calories a day each.

 

The world's oldest city: Damascus
There's quite a bit of controversy over which city gets to officially claim the title of "oldest continuously inhabited city."
With evidence of civilization that extends back over 11,000 years, Damascus in Syria is probably the safest bet.

 
Youngest country in the world: South Sudan
The people of South Sudan were formally recognized as an independent country in 2011, making it the youngest country in the world to-date.

 

The world's most visited city: London
After a several-year bout with Bangkok, London has regained its place as the world's most visited city (according to MasterCard's 2014 Global Destinations City Index). The city sees about 18.69 million international visitors annually, generating $19.3 billion in revenue.

 

The world's least popular country: Iran
On that same rating scale, Iran has come in dead last (at a 59% negativity rating).
Only 15% of people polled viewed Iran in a positive light.

 

The world's most dangerous city: San Pedro Sula, Honduras
In San Pedro Sula, Honduras, there are over 3 murders a day. The violence stems from the city's role as a major hub for illegal drug and arms trafficking.
 

Most caffeinated country in the world: Sweden
The coffee in Sweden will put a spring in your step, and hair on your tongue. The Swedes consume an average of 388 mg of caffeine in coffee per person, per day (that's almost 5 Red Bulls). 

 

Most drunken country in the world: Belarus
In Belarus, each person above the age of 15 drinks an average of 4.62 gallons of alcohol every year.


The most bicycle friendly city in the world: Groningen, Netherlands
By comparing cities along the criterion of average number of bicycle trips made daily, one city reigns supreme:Groningen in the Netherlands. In Groningen about 50 percent of the population commute via bike daily, making it the city with the greatest proportion of cyclists on the planet.
 

World's most energy efficient city: Reykjavik, Iceland
All of the energy and heat used by the citizens of Reykjavik Iceland come from geothermal plants and renewable hydropower, making it the most sustainable and energy efficient city in the world. On their mission to be completely free of fossil fuels by 2050, the city has also been replacing traditional buses with hydrogen-fueled buses, from which the only emissions are water.

 

Most cat friendly country: United States
With a pet cat population of 76.43 million feline friends, the United States dominates the world stage for most cat friendly country in the world.

 

Most dog friendly country: United States
Similarly, America more than doubles the amount of pet dogs any other country has, with a dog population of 61.1 million.

 

Most sexually satisfied country: Switzerland
Switzerland might just be the most progressive and least sexually repressed country in the world.
Between liberal views on pornography and prostitution, and sex ed that starts in Kindergarten, over a fifth of the population consider their sex-lives "excellent." They even recently opened up a very successful array of tax-funded drive-in sex boxes in Zurich. Bonus, in spite of all this, Switzerland also holds the title as one of the lowest teen birth rates in the world.

 

Least sexually satisfied country: Japan
With its extreme conservatism, Japan is the country with the least sexual satisfaction, as only 15% of individualsreported having a fulfilling sex life. Furthermore, over 45% of Japanese women report being either uninterested in, or actually despising, sexual contact

 

Most emotional country in the world: Philippines
Polling citizens in 150 countries over the years of 2009-2011, researchers found that the people of the Philippines were the most likely to respond emotionally to simple questions about their day.

 

Least emotional country in the world: Singapore 
That same study revealed that Singaporeans experience the least emotion on the day-to-day.  Only 3 out of every 10 reported having any emotional reactions to basic scenarios or when describing their days.

 

Country with the longest life expectancy in the world: Monaco
According to the World Health Organization's study from 2013, Monaco tops the charts for longest living citizens, with an average life expectancy of 87.2 years. Men in Monaco live an average 85.3 years, and women live to an average of 89 years.

 

Country with the shortest life expectancy: Sierra Leone
On the other side of that coin, the population of Sierra Leone live to an average of 47 years.
The men of Sierra Leone live to an average of 47 years old, whereas women live an average of 48 years.

 

Sexiest country in the world: Brazil and Australia 
There will always be a debate about which countries are home to the most attractive people, in part because who's to say what is objectively attractive? Though the means are hardly scientific, a recent poll found quite a disparity between which countries men
believe are the sexiest, and which countries women find the sexiest. For men, Brazil tops the charts for the most attractive people.
For women, it's about the thunder down under in Australia.

 

Most stressed-out country in the world: Nigeria
By looking at the dimensions of Homicide Rate, GDP per capita, Income inequality, Corruption, and Unemployment,one thing is clear: Nigeria is hands-down the most stressed out country in the world.

 
Least stressed-out country in the world: Norway
Along the same dimensions, Norway was at the far-end of the other side of the spectrum, and is deemed the least stressed-out country in the world.

 

Country with the highest average IQ: Hong Kong*
There are a lot of factors that can affect an IQ score, ranging from national and personal wealth to simply who makes the test.
As a result, these findings are highly controversial, but seem to suggest that Hong Kong is the country* with the highest IQ, at an average of 107 points. 
*Hong Kong is a special administrative region of China meaning that it falls within the sovereignty of the People's Republic of China, yet does not form part of Mainland China, and has it's own government.

 

Country with the lowest average IQ: Equatorial Guinea
According to "IQ and the Wealth of Nations," Equatorial Guinea caps the low end of the global IQ range, with a national average of 59 points.

 

World's most well-connected city (for internet): Seoul, South Korea 
Surprisingly, despite it's 618 million internet users spending an average of 18.7 hours a week surfing the net, China didn't even make the top 10.

Along the dimensions of average connection speed, availability (weighted towards free access), openness to innovation, support of public data, and  privacy/security, Seoul in South Korea is the champion of internet-connectedness. With 10,000 government supported free WiFi spots dotting the city, and an internet speed that goes unchallenged globally, Seoul is an internet junkie's paradise.

America Wastes $22 Trillion In War On Poverty

By ROBERT RECTOR

 Posted 09/16/2014 05:50 PM ET

Read More At Investor's Business Daily: http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials-perspective/091614-717643-johnson-war-on-poverty-still-hasnt-been-won.htm#ixzz3E5mkcicQ

The Census Bureau's annual report on poverty, released Tuesday, is noteworthy because this year marks the 50th anniversary of President Lyndon Johnson's launch of the War on Poverty.

Liberals claim that the war has failed because we didn't spend enough money. Their answer is to spend more. But the facts show otherwise.

Since its beginning, U.S. taxpayers have spent $22 trillion on Johnson's War on Poverty (in constant 2012 dollars). Adjusting for inflation, that's three times more than was spent on all military wars since the American Revolution.

The federal government currently runs more than 80 means-tested welfare programs. These programs provide cash, food, housing and medical care to low-income Americans. Federal and state spending on these programs last year was $943 billion.

(These figures do not include Social Security, Medicare or unemployment insurance.)

Over 100 million people, about a third of the U.S. population, received aid from at least one welfare program at an average cost of $9,000 per recipient in 2013. If converted to cash, current means-tested spending is five times the amount needed to eliminate all poverty in the U.S.

But the Census will almost certainly proclaim that around 14% of Americans are still poor. The present poverty rate is almost exactly the same as it was in 1967, a few years after the War on Poverty started. Census data actually show that poverty has gotten worse over the last 40 years.

How is this possible? How can the taxpayers spend $22 trillion on welfare while poverty gets worse? The answer is that it isn't possible. Census counts a family as poor if its income falls below specified thresholds. But in counting family "income," Census ignores nearly the entire $943 billion welfare state.

For most Americans, the word "poverty" means significant material deprivation, an inability to provide a family with adequate nutritious food, reasonable shelter and clothing. But only a small portion of the more than 40 million people labeled as poor by Census fit that description.

The media frequently associate the idea of poverty with being homeless. But less than 2% of the poor are homeless. Only one in 10 live in mobile homes. The typical house or apartment of the poor is in good repair, uncrowded and actually larger than the average dwelling of non-poor French, Germans or English.

According to government surveys, the typical family that Census identifies as poor has air-conditioning, cable or satellite TV, and a computer. Forty percent have a wide-screen HDTV, and another 40% have Internet access. Three quarters of the poor own a car and roughly a third have two or more cars.

These numbers are not the result of the current bad economy pushing middle-class families into poverty; instead, they reflect a steady improvement in living conditions among the poor for many decades.

The intake of protein, vitamins and minerals by poor children is virtually identical with upper-middle-class kids. According to surveys by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the overwhelming majority of poor people report that they were not hungry even for a single day during the prior year.

We can be grateful that the living standards of all Americans, including the poor, have risen in the past half-century. But the War on Poverty has not succeeded according to LBJ's original goal.

Johnson's aim was not to prop up living standards by making more and more people dependent on an ever-larger welfare state. Instead, he sought to increase self-sufficiency, the ability of a family to support itself out of poverty without dependence on welfare aid.

Johnson asserted that the War on Poverty would actually shrink the welfare rolls and transform the poor from "tax-eaters" into "taxpayers." Judged by that standard, the War on Poverty has been a colossal flop. The welfare state has undermined self-sufficiency by discouraging work and penalizing marriage.

When the War on Poverty began, 7% of children were born outside marriage; today, 42% are. By eroding marriage, the welfare state has made many Americans less capable of self-support than when the War on Poverty began.

President Obama plans to spend $13 trillion on means-tested welfare over the next decade. Most of this spending will flow through traditional welfare programs that discourage the keys to self-sufficiency: work and marriage.

Rather than doubling down on the mistakes of the past, we should restructure the welfare state around Johnson's original goal: increasing Americans' capacity for self-support.

Welfare should no longer be a one-way handout. Able-bodied recipients of cash, food and housing should be required to work or prepare for work as condition of receiving aid. Welfare's penalties against marriage should be reduced.

By returning to the original vision of aiding the poor to aid themselves, we can begin, in Johnson's words, to "replace their despair with opportunity."

• Rector is a Heritage Foundation senior research fellow and an authority on poverty, the welfare system and immigration. This article first appeared in The Daily Signal.

Read More At Investor's Business Daily: http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials-perspective/091614-717643-johnson-war-on-poverty-still-hasnt-been-won.htm#ixzz3E5lwnrPO
Follow us: @IBDinvestors on Twitter | InvestorsBusinessDaily on Facebook

Ted Kennedy's Soviet Gambit

8/28/2009 @ 12:01AM

Picking his way through the Soviet archives that Boris Yeltsin had just thrown open, in 1991 Tim Sebastian, a reporter for the London Times, came across an arresting memorandum. Composed in 1983 by Victor Chebrikov, the top man at the KGB, the memorandum was addressed to Yuri Andropov, the top man in the entire USSR. The subject: Sen. Edward Kennedy.

“On 9-10 May of this year,” the May 14 memorandum explained, “Sen. Edward Kennedy’s close friend and trusted confidant [John] Tunney was in Moscow.” (Tunney was Kennedy’s law school roommate and a former Democratic senator from California.) “The senator charged Tunney to convey the following message, through confidential contacts, to the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Y. Andropov.”

Kennedy’s message was simple. He proposed an unabashed quid pro quo. Kennedy would lend Andropov a hand in dealing with President Reagan. In return, the Soviet leader would lend the Democratic Party a hand in challenging Reagan in the 1984 presidential election. “The only real potential threats to Reagan are problems of war and peace and Soviet-American relations,” the memorandum stated. “These issues, according to the senator, will without a doubt become the most important of the election campaign.”

Kennedy made Andropov a couple of specific offers.

First he offered to visit Moscow. “The main purpose of the meeting, according to the senator, would be to arm Soviet officials with explanations regarding problems of nuclear disarmament so they may be better prepared and more convincing during appearances in the USA.” Kennedy would help the Soviets deal with Reagan by telling them how to brush up their propaganda.

Then he offered to make it possible for Andropov to sit down for a few interviews on American television. “A direct appeal … to the American people will, without a doubt, attract a great deal of attention and interest in the country. … If the proposal is recognized as worthy, then Kennedy and his friends will bring about suitable steps to have representatives of the largest television companies in the USA contact Y.V. Andropov for an invitation to Moscow for the interviews. … The senator underlined the importance that this initiative should be seen as coming from the American side.”

Kennedy would make certain the networks gave Andropov air time–and that they rigged the arrangement to look like honest journalism.

Kennedy’s motives? “Like other rational people,” the memorandum explained, “[Kennedy] is very troubled by the current state of Soviet-American relations.” But that high-minded concern represented only one of Kennedy’s motives.

“Tunney remarked that the senator wants to run for president in 1988,” the memorandum continued. “Kennedy does not discount that during the 1984 campaign, the Democratic Party may officially turn to him to lead the fight against the Republicans and elect their candidate president.”

Kennedy proved eager to deal with Andropov–the leader of the Soviet Union, a former director of the KGB and a principal mover in both the crushing of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and the suppression of the 1968 Prague Spring–at least in part to advance his own political prospects.

In 1992, Tim Sebastian published a story about the memorandum in the London Times. Here in the U.S., Sebastian’s story received no attention. In his 2006 book, The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism, historian Paul Kengor reprinted the memorandum in full. “The media,” Kengor says, “ignored the revelation.”

“The document,” Kengor continues, “has stood the test of time. I scrutinized it more carefully than anything I’ve ever dealt with as a scholar. I showed the document to numerous authorities who deal with Soviet archival material. No one has debunked the memorandum or shown it to be a forgery. Kennedy’s office did not deny it.”

Why bring all this up now? No evidence exists that Andropov ever acted on the memorandum–within eight months, the Soviet leader would be dead–and now that Kennedy himself has died even many of the former senator’s opponents find themselves grieving. Yet precisely because Kennedy represented such a commanding figure–perhaps the most compelling liberal of our day–we need to consider his record in full.

Doing so, it turns out, requires pondering a document in the archives of the politburo.

When President Reagan chose to confront the Soviet Union, calling it the evil empire that it was, Sen. Edward Kennedy chose to offer aid and comfort to General Secretary Andropov. On the Cold War, the greatest issue of his lifetime, Kennedy got it wrong.

Peter Robinson, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and a former White House speechwriter, writes a weekly column for Forbes.

A 12-Year-Old's Quest To Remake Education, One Arduino At A Time

Twelve-year-old electronics prodigy Quin Etnyre wanted to make education more fun. So he became a teacher.

By Susan Moran Posted 08.19.2013 at 10:00 am

Quin Etnyre 

Chris McPherson

Quin Etnyre walks to the front of a crowded room at Deezmaker 3D Printers and Hackerspace in Pasadena, California. He adjusts his laptop on the workbench, then looks up and addresses the class. "Thanks for coming out on a Saturday," he says, his voice barely audible over the steady hum of servomotors. The students, 18 middle-aged men and preteen boys, look on as Quin straightens his MIT T-shirt and swipes an index finger across an iPod. The screen behind him flashes "Intro to Arduino Class."


He explains to the group, which includes a toy maker, an engineer, and a high-school electronics teacher, that he'll be showing them how to program an Arduino—a $30 microcontroller board that can convert sensory inputs into outputs, making objects interactive. "First I want to demonstrate some cool things I made that you can make too," he says, reaching into a backpack. Two men stop whispering and turn toward him. Quin pulls out the FuzzBot, a bug-eyed, four-wheeled robot slightly smaller than a shoebox. Then he holds up a baseball cap with LEDs stitched into the fabric.

Most didn't realize their instructor, a rising star in the DIY-electronics movement, is also a 12-year-old."This is a Gas Cap. Well, it's really a fart sensor," he says, with a straight face and inscrutable tone. He describes how he programmed the lights to blink when the sensor detects methane. Several boys in the room burst out laughing. The men look confused, uncertain what to make of their instructor. They knew from his reputation that he is a rising star in the DIY-electronics movement; most didn't realize until they got here today that he is also a 12-year-old.

FuzzBot 

To make his autonomous FuzzBot, Quin Etnyre started with a robot chassis kit for Arduino that he received last Christmas. "And then one morning, I decided to hook up a Parallax Ping sensor so that it could avoid obstacles," he says. "From then on, I worked on the code and perfected it." Quin also added extra functionality; the FuzzBot can clean floors. He calls it a "hackable mini Roomba" because he attached a duster cloth as a tail that lifts dirt in its wake. Now he's working on a wireless controller. For build instructions, go here 

Brian Klutch

Quin tells the students to boot up their laptops and install free Arduino software. Then they each open a box containing sensors, a breadboard, a circuit board, and other parts. For the next four hours, Quin guides the group through six hands-on projects, culminating in an electronic meter that measures voltage coming across a potentiometer and displays the values on an LED bar graph. When his meter flashes to life, a wiry boy sitting near the front yelps with delight.

As the class winds down, Deezmaker's owner, Diego Porqueras, announces that Quin has some products for sale, including custom ArduSensors that can measure flex, force, light, knocks, temperature, magnetism, and, yes, methane. Quin heads to a table in the back where his parents, Ethan Etnyre and Karen Mikuni, have been hovering quietly. As the men and boys line up, Quin morphs from teacher to entrepreneur. "You get a 20-percent discount if you buy three or more products today," he says.


Cheap, open-source, and user-friendly, Arduino consists of both hardware (circuit boards) and software (a programming language). The two can be combined in an almost infinite number of ways to make even the most whimsical projects—tweeting coffee pots, automated cat doors—attainable. A team of software engineers and designers released Arduino in 2005 as a teaching tool for graduate students in interactive design, but it quickly caught on in the DIY community. By 2011, more than 250,000 Arduinos had been sold around the world, and a cottage industry of manufacturers and distributors had sprung up.

That's also the year Quin Etnyre, bored with the limits of the LEGO Mindstorms robotics kit, got hooked on soldering circuit boards at Maker Faire Bay Area. He soon began ordering components online and taught himself how to code. "When I started, I thought it was all about zeros and ones and that it was going to be really hard," Quin says. "It was so cool to learn that with just one line of code and almost-plain English, I could make an LED blink."

For his eleventh birthday, his parents—both family physicians baffled by their son's new obsession—flew with him from central California to Boulder, Colorado, where he took an Arduino class at the headquarters of online retailer SparkFun Electronics. He was the youngest student by at least a decade, but before long, others were turning to him for help.

Quin teaching 

Quin regularly instructs electronics classes, like this one at Deezmaker. "Quin does a better job teaching than most adults," says Tara Tiger Brown, of LA Makerspace.

Chris McPherson

In the months that followed, Quin spent hours after school coding, soldering, and brainstorming new projects, including the Gas Cap, which became an instant hit in the online DIY community Instructables. "I was amazed that someone his age built it," says Randy Sarafan, Instructables' technology editor. "You have to understand electronics to begin with and then translate them into a fabric environment."

Quin launched a company, Qtechknow, in the spring of 2012 so he could reach more people with his ArduSensors, and he wrote detailed tutorials explaining how to use them. He also negotiated a deal with SparkFun; the retailer now sells the Qtechknow ArduSensor Learning Kit, which contains several circuit boards and eight types of sensors.

Recently, Quin persuaded his parents to let him convert the family garage into a hackerspace where he and his friends could work on projects together. Now devoid of automobiles, it contains a long workbench littered with safety goggles, soldering irons, and a $30 toaster oven that Quin uses to manufacture circuit boards. Nearby, a stack of plastic drawers holds wires, LED lights, and other parts. Quin also uses the space to teach monthly workshops on such topics as how to hack a Wii Nunchuk game controller so that it interfaces with the Google Earth flight simulator. In the spring, he returned to Maker Faire—this time, as a featured speaker.

Quin being a kid 

Quin "acts and functions like both a grownup and a preadolescent male," Mike Hord, a design engineer at SparkFun Electronics, observes. 

Chris McPherson

Everyone who has met Quin agrees that, both technically and personally, he stands out. "Quin is extremely over-the-top self-motivated and driven," says Tara Tiger Brown, executive director of LA Makerspace. Quin's biography on Twitter sums this up as well: "I'm a 12-year-old maker that loves Arduino and electronics. I run my own electronics company selling @ArduSensors and will be going to MIT in 7 years."


"Quin is a bellwether for a whole generation of kids, many who haven't even been identified yet."But Quin embodies a groundswell of preteen inventors enabled by cheap hardware, free software, and the proliferation of hackerspaces around the country—some, such as Maker Kids in Toronto and LA Makerspace in California, designed with young hackers in mind. "He's a bellwether for a whole generation of kids, many who haven't even been identified yet," says Jeff Branson, SparkFun's educational outreach coordinator. "We're seeing more and more kids like Quin getting together and teaching each other."

Another young maker at the forefront of this trend, Super-Awesome Sylvia (Sylvia Todd, age 12), has a YouTube show that has more than 1.5 million views. In recent episodes, she taught her audience how to build squishy circuits with LEDs and a heartbeat-sensor pendant using LilyPad, an Arduino microcontroller board designed for textiles. At the White House Science Fair in April, she showed President Obama her WaterColorBot, a robot that paints.

Both SparkFun and Adafruit Industries, another DIY-electronics retailer, have expanded their education teams to reach the next Quin and Sylvia where they study or play. "There is a worldwide demand from young people to learn more, share more, and become the next generation of scientists and engineers," says Limor Fried, Adafruit's founder. To encourage them, Adafruit now makes "skill badges"—a geeky nod to traditional Boy Scout and Girl Scout merit badges—awarding proficiency in areas such as soldering, programming, and successfully using Ohm's law.

Sylvia Todd 

In an episode of Super Awesome Mini Maker Show, Sylvia Todd describes a "coppertastic build" for etching copper jewelry or circuit boards; it has nearly 300,000 views on YouTube. Sylvia started the series with her dad in 2010; she now has 20 episodes that feature entry-level, open-source projects for kids. 

Courtesy Sylvia’s super-awesome mini maker show/Youtube

Inspired by Adafruit's badges, a nonprofit organization called the Hacker Scouts formed in Oakland, California, in 2012. It promotes a network of guilds (rather than troops) designed to teach and mentor children ages 8 to 15. New "hackerlings" master basic skills, such as sewing, woodworking, and simple use of the Linux operating system, and then work in crews on more complicated projects. The guilds have spread to 11 cities in the U.S. Another national organization, Maker Corps, has begun training 18- to 22-year-olds to become mentors to kids and young teenagers both online and in physical makerspaces.

FIRST, an organization started by inventor Dean Kamen, has also rapidly expanded. It uses robotics programs to get students from kindergarten through high school excited about engineering. This year 2,546 teams from around the world competed in its flagship event, the FIRST Robotics Competition—a 300 percent increase from 10 years ago, according to Kevin O'Connor, a robotics engineer who helps design the annual challenge.

A 2011 study published in the journal Science Education showed that high-school seniors who express an interest in pursuing science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) are three times more likely to complete college degrees in those subjects. The key to getting students to that tipping point, says lead author Adam Maltese, an assistant professor of science education at Indiana University, seems to be exposing them early to a STEM experience that sparks their interest, then providing them with a way to maintain it—a formula that Quin has already mapped out.


The day after his Arduino class at Deezmaker, Quin climbs into the backseat of the family car. While his dad steers onto Highway 101 toward their home near San Luis Obispo, California, Quin digs into his backpack and pulls out a Rubik's cube. He solves it in 16 seconds. Then he turns on his parents' iPad and starts typing. He explains that he's been rethinking K–12 education—and that he has come up with a much better system. He calls it the New Qtechknow School.


"School is pretty boring, but it could be a lot more interesting and interactive," he says. "More hands-on and more mentoring." According to his plan, three schools—grades K–3, 4–8, and 9–12—would sit side by side on one campus so that older students could mentor younger ones at least once a day. Quin's been helping other students with math for several years. "It's fun to teach other kids, and little kids look up to older kids," he says thoughtfully. "It helped me learn when I was young because it was fun." Plus, he points out, the older kids would get experience teaching, which would help them decide whether to pursue an education degree in college. Not surprisingly, the teachers at the New Qtechknow School would focus heavily on science and engineering.

In the meantime, Quin is making sure his current school system can provide more hands-on education. In March, he and his father visited Raynee Daley, the assistant superintendent of business services in his school district, and suggested that teachers use electronics kits in their classes. Daley didn't know anything about Arduino, but Quin impressed her with a demonstration of his FuzzBot and other projects. "I knew this kid was absolutely brilliant," she says. "And I believe that hands-on learning is critical."

Nine Volt Battery 

Quin experiments with an age-old form of DIY electronics: licking a nine-volt battery to feel a shock. 

Chris McPherson

Daley appealed to the superintendent, and he agreed to let Quin present to a broader group; more than a dozen principals and teachers showed up for his lunchtime electronics lesson. "I looked around the room and saw everybody, except maybe the robotics guy, with their mouths open, amazed," Daley says. This fall, the school district will bring a SparkFun education team to train some of the teachers. By August 2014, when Quin will enroll as a freshman, Arroyo Grande High School hopes to have a DIY-electronics program. "Quin has made us all think differently about what the future of education could be like," Daley says.

A couple hours into the car ride home, Quin is still typing on his iPad, tweaking his plan to overhaul the U.S. education system. But suddenly his dreams turn more immediate and visceral. He fires up the browser and searches for the nearest In-N-Out Burger. Then he makes a plea identical to that of kids everywhere: "Can I get two orders of French fries, Mom?"

This article originally appeared in the September 2013 issue of Popular Science.