This paper presents ideas about how to engage students, especially girls, in STEM through IEEE REACH, a novel open education resource (OER) program that provides pre-university teachers with free resources that empower educators to incorporate the social relevance of technology in the classroom. Managed for IEEE by the IEEE History Center, the REACH program does this through the lens of history. The paper will also share a successful international implementation of the REACH resources in Uganda, Africa. The project was a collaboration among the IEEE History Center, UNESCO, the IEEE Uganda Section, the IEEE Africa Council, and the Uganda Ministry of Education. The goal was to engage girls in STEM both in the classroom and via a classroom trailer to reach rural areas. It has expanded and is currently being scaled up to STEM teachers by the Uganda Ministry of Education via a top-down approach. REACH is also being positioned for expansion in other African countries. Understanding the social relevance of technology and engineering is an essential part of technological literacy and a catalyst for engaging students in STEM in the pre-university environment. ITEEA defines technology literacy as “… a person who understands, in increasingly sophisticated ways that evolve over time, what technology is, how it is created, and how it shapes society, and in turn is shaped by society,” while the ASEE similarly defines the Engineering-literate student as “appreciating and recognizing the influence of engineering on society and society on engineering.” Yet there are few programs that provide resources necessary to include the social relevance of technology in the pre-university classroom. Additionally, recent research shows that “perceiving science as more socially relevant is associated with… a substantial increase in girls' expectations to major in a STEM field”, including in the specific field of engineering. Through the lens of history, IEEE REACH offers pre-university educators resources that that empower them to incorporate the social implications of technology in the classroom and enhances critical thinking and problem-solving skills, while boosting cultural and technological literacy. The program provides a unique lens through which students may view engineering and technology as relevant to their lives and their future, providing a new STEM education pathway. The paper will describe the REACH Program in more detail, indicate its alignment with global standards, and demonstrate how the combination of an inquiry designed format and historical narratives are being used to link abstract concepts, such as how problems have been solved in the past, with real-life situations today.

This month we continue a series of reprints from the IEEE Global History Network's STARS articles. STARS is an online compendium of invited, peer-reviewed articles on the history of major developments in electrical and computer science and technology. Some light editing has been done, along with the addition of a few illustrations, to make the article more suitable for a journal publication. This article provides a brief history of the artificial cardiac pacemaker, a truly significant technological achievement of engineers, scientists, and doctors that has benefited humanity.

This article presents a short review of the life and work of Alfred Norton Goldsmith, founding editor of the Proceedings of the IRE.

As the Institute of Radio Engineers (IRE) and its flagship publication Proceedings of the IRE (now known as Proceedings of the IEEE) mark their 90th anniversary, it is interesting to note how radio once revolutionized society and brought the world closer, much as the Internet is doing today. The Harold Henry Beverage interview is a prime example of how the IEEE History Center can preserve information on an important figure in the history of engineering and its impact on technology who otherwise might not be known to the general public or even to today's practitioners outside of a narrow subfield. It is also an example of how we can learn about engineers as individuals. Finally, it demonstrates how the History Center serves as keeper of both IEEE's technological and institutional histories, for Beverage was to rise to become President of the IRE.

Despite the early identification of Edison with space flight in science fiction, journalists and the public tend to view events such as the moon landing as the triumphs of mechanical and aeronautical engineers and "rocket scientists". IEEE members know that the picture is more complex, and that the developments in flight and, more particularly, space travel in this century would not have been possible without the contributions of electrical, electronic and computer engineers, especially in the areas of telecommunications, telemetry, navigation and guidance. At the same time, the research and development sparked by astronautical needs made widespread contributions to the broader fields of electronics and computer engineering. As the author shows, most of the more spectacular advances in aircraft and rocketry were intertwined with developments in electrical engineering, particularly electronics and computing.

Anthropology has always included and continues to include the social aspects of technology and innovation. Despite early calls for the inclusion of this research in the field of science, technology, and society, anthropological research, particularly in the realm of prehistory, has by and large not been integrated into this new discipline. This is unfortunate, as anthropology draws data from a range of human experience much broader culturally and deeper historically than political scientists, historians, economists, and so forth, which can benefit areas of inquiry such as technology and gender.

Almost every aspect of our lives has been affected by new pharmaceuticals, new surgical techniques, new imaging techniques, and new understandings of disease. The story of the transformation of our view of our inside selves, and its consequences, is well known to the general public. What is perhaps less well known is the role of electrical engineering in this unprecedented revolution, and the authors reveal some of this "inside story". As in almost every field of human technological endeavor, the application of electrical engineering to medicine in the twentieth century was profoundly affected by the development of electronics, its stepchild the computer, and related mathematical advances. Biomedical engineers have been involved in the invention of instrumentation, the development of sensory aids, prostheses, and other therapeutic devices, and the applications of physics and systems theory to physiological systems, including the use of mathematical models. There are three areas of biomedical engineering, however, that uniquely involve the transmission and/or reception of electromagnetic radiation into or out of the human body itself in order to diagnose and/or treat illness-pure "electromagnetic engineering". It is on these areas, therefore, that the authors focus in telling the story of the "bioelectrical century". We refer to electrophysiology, electrotherapy, and imaging.