Boston Globe columnist Scott Kirsner spotlights Professor Mitchel Resnick, head of the Lifelong Kindergarten group; Professor Neil Gershenfeld, director of MIT's Center for Bits + Atoms (CBA); and the late Professor Emeritus Woodie Flowers and their work developing programs that “get kids excited about, and more proficient in, STEM.”

The four programs mentioned are the Scratch programming language, the Computer Clubhouse Network, the fab lab network of makerspaces, and the FIRST robotics competitions.

The Computer Clubhouse and Scratch both originated from Resnick and the Lifelong Kindergarten group. The Computer Clubhouse's goal was to teach kids how to use computers by making their own projects. From the Clubhouses came Scratch, a programming language, as a response to learning of kids' desire to write software, but finding existing languages were too hard to learn, or couldn’t easily do what they aimed to do. 

Gershenfeld created the first fab lab with late civil rights activist Mel King. The Fab Lab Network began by bringing prototyping machinery into that first Computer Clubhouse in the late 1990s, and now its network of 2,700 makerspaces in 150 countries let students develop their own project ideas.