Features

Beautiful Land Market, Ames’ premiere handmade and vintage pop-up market, is set to hold their newest pop-up event, a Spring Market, on Saturday, June 1st from 9am-4pm at the Vermeer Applied Technology Hub, 2710 South Loop Drive, in the ISU Research Park.

Since the dawn of the internet age some three decades ago, it has become increasingly more common for teams from distant corners of the globe to come together remotely. What was once novel is now commonplace. With access to an internet connection, a programmer in India can link with an engineer in Indiana and a product specialist in Innsbruck in real- time to push forward any imaginable product or project.

Surrounded by firms focused to pushing the bounds of the technology of tomorrow, TMC’s satellite office in Ames may look a little out of place. The transportation company is focused on efficiently moving multi-ton flatbeds, packed with hard goods, across concrete and asphalt from sea-to-shining-sea. By contrast, by many of its neighbors in the Iowa State Research Park “push weight” by bouncing bits of data around the internet.

Learning to design and build has always been a big part of early education. For centuries, children have been encouraged to explore their imagination with everything from simple blocks carved from wood in the early days to more recent innovations like Lincoln Logs, Legos and the Erector Set. As children enter elementary classrooms activities involving creating, building, and exploring have been often demphasized in favor or traditional math and science instruction. Recently there has been a new movement for including project-based STEM and engineering activities at the earliest grade levels.