2026-01-31 00:30:23
Wikipedia celebrates its 25th anniversary this month as the internet’s most reliable knowledge source. Yet behind the celebrations, a troubling pattern has developed: the volunteer community that built this encyclopedia has lately rejected a key innovation designed to serve readers. The same institution founded on the principle of easy and open community collaboration could now be proving unmovable—trapped between the need to adapt and an institutional resistance to change.
Political economist Elinor Ostrom won the 2009 Nobel Prize in economics for studying the ways communities successfully manage shared resources—the “commons.” Wikipedia’s two founders (Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger) established the internet’s open-source encyclopedia 25 years ago on principles of the commons: its volunteer editors create and enforce policies, resolve disputes, and shape the encyclopedia’s direction.
But building around the commons contains a trade-off, Ostrom’s work found. Communities that make collective decisions tend to develop strong institutional identities. And those identities sometimes spawn reflexively conservative impulses.
Giving users agency over Wikipedia’s rules, as I’ve discovered in some of my own studies of Wikipedia, can lead an institution away ultimately from the needs of those the institution serves.
Wikipedia’s editors have built the largest collaborative knowledge project in human history. But the governance these editors exercise increasingly resists new generations of innovation.
Paradoxically, Wikipedia’s revolutionarily collaborative structure once put it at the vanguard of innovation on the open internet. But now that same structure may be failing newer generations of readers.
There’s a generational disconnect today at the heart of Wikipedia’s current struggles. The encyclopedia’s format remains wedded to the information-dense, text-heavy style of Encyclopaedia Britannica—the very model Wikipedia was designed to replace.
A Britannica replacement made sense in 2001. One-quarter of a century ago, the average internet user was older and accustomed to reading long-form content.
However, teens and twentysomethings today are of a very different demographic and have markedly different media consumption habits compared to Wikipedia’s forebears. Gen Z and Gen Alpha readers are accustomed to TikTok, YouTube, and mobile-first visual media. Their impatience for Wikipedia’s impenetrable walls of text, as any parent of kids of this age knows, arguably threatens the future of internet’s collaborative knowledge clearinghouse.
The Wikimedia Foundation knows this, too. Research has shown that many readers today greatly value quick overviews of any article, before the reader considers whether to dive into the article’s full text.
So last June, the Foundation launched a modest experiment they called “Simple Article Summaries.” The summaries consisted of AI-generated, simplified text at the top of complex articles. Summaries were clearly labeled as machine-generated and unverified, and they were available only to mobile users who opted in.
Even after all these precautions, however, the volunteer editor community barely gave the experiment time to begin. Editors shut down Simple Article Summaries within a day of its launch.
The response was fierce. Editors called the experiment a “ghastly idea” and warned of “immediate and irreversible harm” to Wikipedia’s credibility.
Comments in the village pump (a community discussion page) ranged from blunt (“Yuck“) to alarmed, with contributors raising legitimate concerns about AI hallucinations and the erosion of editorial oversight.
Last year’s Simple Summaries storm, and sudden silencing, should be considered in light of historical context. Consider three other flashpoints from Wikipedia’s past:
In 2013, the Foundation launched VisualEditor—a “what you see is what you get” interface meant to make editing easier—as the default for all newcomers. However, the interface often crashed, broke articles, and was so slow that experienced editors fled. After protests erupted, a Wikipedia administrator overrode the Foundation’s rollout, returning VisualEditor to an opt-in feature.
The following year brought Media Viewer, which changed how images displayed. The community voted to disable it. Then, when an administrator implemented that consensus, a Foundation executive reversed the change and threatened to revoke the admin’s privileges. On the German Wikipedia, the Foundation deployed a new “superprotect” user right to prevent the community from turning Media Viewer off.
Even proposals that technically won majority support met resistance. In 2011, the Foundation held a referendum on an image filter that would let readers voluntarily hide graphic content. Despite 56 percent support, the feature was shelved after the German Wikipedia community voted 86 percent against it.
These three controversies from Wikipedia’s past reveals how genuine conversations can achieve—after disagreements and controversy—compromise and evolution of Wikipedia’s features and formats. Reflexive vetoes of new experiments, as the Simple Summaries spat highlighted last summer, is not genuine conversation.
Supplementing Wikipedia’s Encyclopedia Britannica-style format with a small component that contains AI summaries is not a simple problem with a cut-and-dry answer. Though neither were VisualEditor or Media Viewer.
Why did 2025’s Wikipedia crisis result in immediate clampdown, whereas its internal crises between 2011-’14 found more community-based debates involving discussions and plebiscites? Is Wikipedia’s global readership today witnessing the first signs of a dangerous generation gap ?
A still deeper crisis haunts the online encyclopedia: the sustainability of unpaid labor. Wikipedia was built by volunteers who found meaning in collective knowledge creation. That model worked brilliantly when a generation of internet enthusiasts had time, energy, and idealism to spare. But the volunteer base is aging. A 2010 study found the average Wikipedia contributor was in their mid-20s; today, many of those same editors are now in their forties or fifties.
Meanwhile, the tech industry has discovered how to extract billions in value from their work. AI companies train their large language models on Wikipedia’s corpus. The Wikimedia Foundation recently noted it remains one of the highest-quality datasets in the world for AI development. Research confirms that when developers try to omit Wikipedia from training data, their models produce answers that are less accurate, less diverse, and less verifiable.
The irony is stark. AI systems deliver answers derived from Wikipedia without sending users back to the source. Google’s AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and countless other tools have learned from Wikipedia’s volunteer-created content—then present that knowledge in ways that break the virtuous cycle Wikipedia depends on. Fewer readers visit the encyclopedia directly. Fewer visitors become editors. Fewer users donate. The pipeline that sustained Wikipedia for a quarter century is breaking down.
The Simple Summaries situation arguably risks making the encyclopedia increasingly irrelevant to younger generations of readers. And they’ll be relying on Wikipedia’s information commons for the longest timeframe of any cohort now editing or reading it.
On the other hand, a larger mandate does of course remain at Wikipedia to serve as stewards of the information commons. And wrongly implementing Simple Summaries could fail this ambitious objective. Which would be terrible, too.
All of which, frankly, are what open discussions and sometimes-messy referenda are all about: Not just sudden shutdowns.
Meanwhile, AI systems should credit Wikipedia when drawing on its content, maintaining the transparency that builds public trust. Companies profiting from Wikipedia’s corpus should pay for access through legitimate channels like Wikimedia Enterprise, rather than scraping servers or relying on data dumps that strain infrastructure without contributing to maintenance.
Perhaps as the AI marketplace matures, there could be room for new large language models trained exclusively on trustworthy Wikimedia data—transparent, verifiable, and free from the pollution of synthetic AI-generated content. Perhaps, too, Creative Commons licenses need updating to account for AI-era realities.
Perhaps Wikipedia itself needs new modalities for creating and sharing knowledge—ones that preserve editorial rigor while meeting audiences where they are.
Wikipedia has survived edit wars, vandalism campaigns, and countless predictions of its demise. It has patiently outlived the skeptics who dismissed it as unreliable. It has proven that strangers can collaborate to build something remarkable.
But Wikipedia cannot survive by refusing to change. Ostrom’s Nobel prize-winning research reminds us that the communities that govern shared resources often grow conservative over time.
For anyone who cares about the future of reliable information online, Wikipedia’s 25th anniversary is not just a celebration. It is an urgent warning about what happens when the institutions we depend on cannot adapt to the people they are meant to serve.
Dariusz Jemielniak is Vice President of the Polish Academy of Sciences, a Full Professor at Kozminski University in Warsaw, and a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. He served for a decade on the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees and is the author of Common Knowledge? An Ethnography of Wikipedia (Stanford University Press).
2026-01-29 03:37:40
As the Trump administration doubles down on its energy and AI dominance agenda, U.S. energy companies have found themselves navigating tricky communication strategies. Touting the clean, carbon-free nature of renewable energy no longer carries the clout it did under the Biden administration, and policy has shifted against certain forms of renewables. At the same time, energy companies are being called upon to meet rising power demands of data-center developers, many of which are prioritizing carbon-free options.
This has forced energy companies to shift the way they communicate: They must garner political favor while also positioning themselves as an answer to the coming onslaught of electricity demand.
The wind and solar industries are focusing on electricity affordability and the fact that wind farms and photovoltaics are the cheapest and fastest way to add new energy generation. Battery storage developers are aligning themselves with Trump’s domestic manufacturing push, scaling up efforts to shift supply chains to the United States as they battle uncertainty over tariffs.
Nuclear power companies are touting their ability to go small and modular—theoretically a faster way to get reactors running. Next-generation geothermal developers are staying the course but playing up the industry’s crossovers with oil and gas. Hydrogen, too, is being highlighted as similar to fossil fuels. And the offshore wind industry is mostly preoccupied with using the courts to fight the Trump administration’s repeated attempts to ban development.
It’s not that the renewable technologies themselves have changed, says Samuel Furfari, former European Commission senior energy official and current energy geopolitics professor at ESCP Business School in London. “Mr. Trump has made a communication revolution, not an energy revolution,” he says about the state of the industry in the United States and abroad.
Trump’s affinity for fossil fuels and his disdain for certain renewables, such as wind, have constructed a new federal hierarchy of energy sources. On day one of his second term as U.S. president, Trump issued an executive order listing which energy resources his country should promote. The list mentions fossil fuels, geothermal, and nuclear but excludes solar, wind, and hydrogen.
Then, in July, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act slashed renewable energy incentives for wind and solar while extending the tax credits for geothermal through 2033. On 1 December, Trump’s Department of Energy renamed the National Renewable Energy Laboratory to the National Laboratory of the Rockies—a moniker to demote renewables and reflect the lab’s “expanding mission” under Trump. And in an eleventh-hour move, the Department of the Interior at the end of 2025 halted all offshore wind projects under construction, citing national security risks.
At first, the wind and solar industries attempted to fit into the Trump administration’s agenda by leaning into his energy dominance rhetoric, says clean energy consultant Lloyd Ritter in Washington D.C. But after the government gutted tax incentives for wind and solar, and concerns over high electricity bills became a top election issue, industry players prioritized messaging about affordability for consumers, Ritter says.
“Electricity costs are now a thing in politics, and I don’t think that’s going to change anytime soon,” Ritter says. The cost concerns stem from estimates that electricity use in the United States is projected to increase 32 percent by 2030, mostly from data centers, according to the latest forecast from Grid Strategies.
The solar and storage industries are welcoming these demand projections. That’s because solar is still the “fastest and cheapest form of electronics to get onto the grid,” says Raina Hornaday, cofounder of Austin, Texas–based Caprock Renewables, a solar and storage developer. In her view, meeting the load demands of data centers is going to take care of the political backlash that solar and storage have endured under the Trump administration.
Hornaday sees a particular opening for batteries. “The R&D for battery storage is really the winner across the board, and we don’t consider battery storage renewable. It can utilize renewable energy electrons, but it doesn’t have to,” she says. “It can be power from the grid.”
Sage Geosystems harvests heat from underground water reservoirs. The company has recently shifted from talking about geothermal energy as clean to its ability to get electricity to the grid faster to accommodate data-center growth. Sage Geosystems
The communications framing for next-generation geothermal power has shifted too, despite it being a political favorite. Companies in this sector say they are continuing to emphasize geothermal as a baseload power source—something that can crank out electricity 24/7, like fossil fuels can. But projected increases in power demand have shifted other elements of the conversation.
The leading communication strategies now are less about geothermal’s carbon-free benefits and more about getting energy to the grid faster to address data-center growth, says Cindy Taff, CEO of Houston-based startup Sage Geosystems. Geothermal companies are also talking about how their use of drilling technology, know-how, and other synergies borrowed from the oil and gas industries can fast-track development.
“When we first started Sage four and a half years ago, we were talking about it being clean and renewable, but if you think about it, there’s now a little bit more allergic connotation with clean and renewable,” says Taff, who spent more than 35 years in well construction and project management at Shell before founding Sage.
Lessening the use of climate-focused language is something “the whole industry” is doing, adds Geoffrey Garrison, vice president of operations at Quaise Energy, headquartered in Houston. “I think you have to be cognizant of who’s listening and who has got their hands on the lever.… You tailor your message,” he says.
Other Trump administration priorities, like moving industry and manufacturing back to U.S. soil, are top of mind for geothermal companies, says Sarah Jewett, senior vice president of strategy at Fervo Energy, also in Houston. “We are thinking a lot more about localization of [the] supply chain, in large part due to this administration’s focus,” Jewett says.
In its pitches to investors, Fervo Energy includes talking points about how geothermal energy drilling uses technology from the oil and gas industry. Fervo Energy
Overall, Fervo’s messaging has remained “pretty consistent” between U.S. presidential administrations, Jewett says. In its pitch to investors, Fervo includes talking points about how next-generation geothermal uses drilling technology from the oil and gas industry. But clean energy isn’t completely missing from Fervo’s communications. “Some sides of the aisle like parts of it, and other parts of the aisle like other parts of it,” Jewett says.
Like geothermal, nuclear power has enjoyed support from both political parties in the United States. It too is now focusing on touting its ability to meet rising electricity demand, albeit through the restarting of decommissioned reactors, the building of massive new plants, and experimentation with advanced solutions such as small modular reactors and microreactors.
It’s not just U.S. companies that are shifting the message. In November at ADIPEC, the world’s largest annual energy conference, held in Abu Dhabi, widely adopted buzzwords such as “energy transition”—a term referring to the shift away from fossil fuels—were being swapped with “energy addition.”
That’s not solely a result in shifting political tides. The surge in energy demand may indeed necessitate more of an addition, rather than a complete transition. It’s a reasonable shift, given the “hockey stick” demand increase the industry is facing, says Taff at Sage. “Energy transition was, in my opinion, when [demand] uptick was very steady. But now that you’ve got the hockey stick, the use of ‘addition’…is much more applicable,” she says.
Abroad, Trump’s impact reverberates, Furfari says. “We were shy to mention fossil fuel. Mr. Trump does not care, and says, ‘No, we need fossil fuel.’ This is changing the world.”
2026-01-29 00:05:25
This article is crossposted from IEEE Spectrum’s careers newsletter. Sign up now to get insider tips, expert advice, and practical strategies, written in partnership with tech career development company Taro and delivered to your inbox for free!
In this week’s Career Alert, we start with an announcement: Over the past year, our partner Rahul Pandey has shared his insights and advice for how to advance your career. Now, Rahul is passing the torch to a new expert, and this will be his final issue. But don’t worry—we’ll continue bringing the most important news and recommendations straight to your inbox.
In the last issue, we highlighted a few of the most popular pieces of advice from 2025. To see all previous issues, check out our Career Alert archive.
As engineers, continuous learning is a fundamental part of the job. A huge part of learning comes from trying something, getting stuck, and then asking a question to your teammates.
Here’s what is often overlooked in that process: The quality of your question determines the quality of the answer. So it’s worth thinking about how you can level up your question-asking skills.
The guiding principle when it comes to asking a question is simple: Make it easy for others to help you. Let’s break down what that means.
Include the necessary information. In the software engineering world, for instance, asking something like “Can you explain why the app is crashing?” puts an enormous burden on the question recipient to collect more info before they can help you. They’ll need to know:
It’s usually not hard to anticipate what follow-up questions you may receive after you ask a question. Include those details in your question!
Show your work. One of the most common replies to a question is “What have you tried?” This is critical information to include in order to (1) improve the chances that the recipient can help you and (2) prove that you did the necessary homework.
Common details to include are: prior team discussions, code snippets, and relevant data. But be careful not to overdo it. Including too much code in your question will overwhelm anyone who’s trying to help you. You should spend time identifying the snippet that captures the essence of your issue. Remember, the golden rule is to make it easy for others to help you, which requires your judgment on the right level of backstory to include.
Explain your goal. The backstory is deceptively important in any question, especially for technical topics. For example, you may think it’s obvious why you’re trying to add a parameter to a function, but it’s probably not clear to your teammates. An error I’ve seen frequently is that the question is asked at the wrong “altitude”—the asker made some incorrect assumptions that led them to ask the wrong question.
To get the best answers, include a brief explanation of your goals at the beginning of your question to set the context.
Address the right audience: A personal pet peeve of mine from when I worked at Facebook was when an engineer would ping me individually with a generic question that others could have benefited from. Instead of messaging me directly, I wish they had posted in a group forum. By posting to a broader audience, others could have learned from the answer, and there may have been fruitful follow-up discussions. Moreover, asking the group will lead to faster resolution; it removes a single person (me) as the bottleneck.
The question of the 1:1 vs. group forum is just one element to consider. Is your question best handled verbally or in writing? Could your question be answered by a junior colleague, or do you need feedback from your team lead or manager?
By considering the above criteria, the quality of your questions will improve significantly, leading to more effective interactions and learning.
—Rahul
If you work in academia, you’ve probably heard the phrase “publish or perish” used to describe the pressure researchers face to have their names appear in journals. AI tools make scientific research more efficient, boosting individual careers—but there’s a catch. A new analysis of more than 40 million academic papers found that, while AI tools help researchers publish faster, they also narrow the scope of questions scientists investigate. Instead, AI-heavy research clusters around data-rich problems, leading some to worry about declining originality and innovation.
Sergey Antonovich is an engineer with an unusual hobby: building digital accordions. In his day job, Antonovich develops embedded systems for self-driving cars. But when he rediscovered a childhood passion for music, he found surprising similarities in the skills needed to make his own musical instruments. Read about his career and watch Antonovich show off his accordions, including one he calls the “Partymaker.”
AI is reshaping expectations for entry-level workers in every industry, including engineer and tech roles. What does that mean for recent grads and other job seekers? Now, employers are seeking graduates who can work at a higher level from their first day on the job and use AI tools effectively. Practical experience, critical thinking, and AI proficiency could help you stay ahead in an evolving job market.
2026-01-28 23:04:38
In the 1990s, astronomers confirmed the first planets orbiting stars beyond our sun. Since then, the tally has risen steadily, and last year it crossed a striking milestone: more than 6,000 known exoplanets. NASA’s Exoplanet Archive has captured not just the growing count but how dramatically the pace has accelerated, as new techniques and space telescopes have come on line. The steepest rises coincide with data releases from NASA’s Kepler space telescope, which discovered thousands of new planets.
With such an extensive catalog of worlds, researchers can look for patterns. They can compare planet sizes, masses, and compositions; track how tightly planets orbit their stars; and measure the prevalence of different kinds of planetary systems. Those statistics allow astronomers to estimate how frequently planets form, and to start making informed guesses about how often conditions arise that could support life. The Drake Equation uses such estimates to tackle one of humanity’s most profound questions: Are we alone in the universe?
The sample is still shaped by the limits of current instruments, which favor large planets in close-in orbits, but that bias may soon ease. NASA’s upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, designed to survey wide swaths of the sky, is expected to find thousands of new planets, especially colder worlds far from their stars. It may reshape the discovery curve once again.
This article appears in the February 2026 print issue as “Six Thousand Alien Worlds and Counting.”
TERRESTRIAL
These small, dense worlds are made mostly of rock and metal and are comparable in size to Earth or Mars. They can have widely varying temperatures and atmospheres, and some may ultimately prove capable of hosting liquid water.
NEPTUNE-LIKE
These planets are similar in size to Neptune and have thick atmospheres rich in hydrogen and helium surrounding denser, ice-rich interiors. They are larger than super-Earths but far less massive than gas giants.
SUPER-EARTH
These planets are larger than Earth but smaller than Neptune and span a wide range of compositions, from rocky worlds with thick atmospheres to gas-rich planets. They are among the most common exoplanets and have no direct counterparts in our solar system.
GAS GIANT
These massive planets are dominated by hydrogen and helium and lack a solid surface, like Jupiter and Saturn. Some orbit extremely close to their stars as “hot Jupiters,” while others circle at much greater distances.
THE “GOLDILOCKS ZONE” [green] is the range of distances from a star where temperatures could allow liquid water to exist on a planet’s surface, depending on the star’s size and brightness. Liquid water is considered essential for life as we know it.
2026-01-27 22:00:03
More than 97 percent of the new cars Norwegians registered in November 2025 were electric, almost reaching the country’s goal of 100 percent. As a result, the government has begun removing some of the many carrots it used to encourage its successful EV transition. Cecilie Knibe Kroglund, state secretary in the country’s Ministry of Transport, reveals some of the challenges that come with success.
Cecilie Knibe Kroglund is the state secretary in Norway’s Ministry of Transport.
What were the important early steps to promote the EV switch?
Kroglund: Battery-electric vehicles have had exemptions from the 25 percent value-added tax and from the CO2- and weight-based registration tax that apply to combustion-engine vehicles. We used other tax incentives to encourage building charging stations on highways and in rural areas. Cities had the opportunity to exempt zero-emissions cars from toll roads. EV drivers also got reduced ferry fares, free parking, and access to bus lanes in many cities. The technology for the vehicles wasn’t that good at the start of the incentives program, but we had the taxes and incentives to make traditional passenger cars more expensive.
What were the biggest barriers, and how did policymakers overcome them?
Kroglund: Early on the technology was challenging. In summertime it was easy to fuel the EV, but in wintertime it’s double the use of energy. But the technology has improved a lot in the last five years.
The Norwegian tax exemptions on EVs were introduced before EVs came to market and were decisive in offsetting the early disadvantages of EVs compared to conventional cars, especially regarding comfort, vehicle size, and range. The rapid expansion of charging infrastructure along major corridors has also been important to overcome range anxiety.
How have private companies responded to government incentives?
Kroglund: I’m personally surprised that it went so well. This was a long-term commitment from the government, and the market has responded to that. Many Norwegian companies use EVs. The market for charging infrastructure is considered commercially viable and no longer needs financial support. However, we don’t see commercial-vehicle adoption going as fast as passenger vehicles, and we had the same goal. So we will have to review the goals, and we’ll have to review the incentives.
What unexpected new problems is Norway’s success creating?
Kroglund: The success of the passenger-vehicle policies mean EVs are in competition with public transport in the larger cities. Driving an EV remains much cheaper than driving a conventional car even without tax exemptions, and overall car use continues to rise. National, regional, and local governments must find different tools to promote walking, bicycling, and public transport because each city and region is different.
How applicable are these lessons to poorer or less well-administered countries and why?
Kroglund: We are different as countries. The geographies are different, and some countries have even bigger cities than our national population. This is not a policy for L.A., but what we see in Norway is that incentives work. However, tax incentives are only applicable in systems where effective taxation is established, which may not be the case in poorer countries. Other benefits, such as lower local emissions, only apply in places with lots of traffic.
The Norwegian experience shows that the economic incentives work, but it also shows that EVs work even in a country with cold weather.
This article appears in the February 2026 print issue as “Cecilie Knibe Kroglund.”
2026-01-27 03:00:03
“Until we get equality in education, we won’t have an equal society.” Spoken by Sonia Sotomayor, associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, the words echo sharply across regions of the world where education is not guaranteed.
In the far northeastern corner of India—where villages are located in forests, on mountains, and along riverbanks—rural classrooms often operate with limited resources and even fewer opportunities. In districts such as Dhemaji, Assam, and the rural areas of Kharagpur and West Bengal, learning STEM often is just a distant dream.
I grew up in rural areas, and I saw how curiosity for science collided with poverty. Many students’ futures rely entirely on getting good grades to determine whether they are “worthy” of studying technical subjects later. One low grade on an exam can completely derail their future. More importantly, the absence of fully equipped laboratories, trained mentors, or exposure to STEM careers prevents many children from even being able to imagine an engineering career.
This is not just an educational issue. It is a matter of equity, directly aligned with U.N. Sustainable Development Goal 4, which aims to ensure a quality education for everyone.
The challenge is one that organizations such as IEEE, with its global technical community, are positioned to address. As technology becomes more imperative for everyday life, proficiency in electronics and programming is no longer optional—it is essential.
In December 2020 volunteers from the joint student chapter of the IEEE Antennas and Propagation–Microwave Theory and Techniques (IEEE AP-MTT) societies at the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur launched a grassroots STEM outreach initiative with support from the IEEE Kharagpur Section.
I coordinated the initiative, which started when I was secretary of the student chapter. (I also was its vice chair and chair from 2020 to 2022.) Today I am a student ambassador for the IEEE MTT Society and the IEEE Young Professionals cochair of the IEEE Benelux MTT-AP joint chapter.
The program’s mission was simple: make hands-on electronics accessible to students who had never seen an Arduino board.
It began with training in the fundamentals of circuit building—LEDs, switches, breadboards, and batteries—and progressed into Arduino programming, automation, and sensor integration. The volunteers emphasized teamwork and friendly competitions to keep students engaged.
Through straightforward, relatable demonstrations, even complex topics such as electromagnetic concepts were explained in ways that the students could understand. The methodology not only increased understanding; it also sparked enthusiasm. In the first year, nearly 100 students from five schools benefited from the curriculum. The model is now known as Teach, Train, and Build (TTB). The initiative was recognized in 2021 with the IEEE Darrel Chong Student Activity Award.
TTB’s success led to additional funding from the IEEE Special Interest Group in Humanitarian Technology (SIGHT) program in 2022. This support from IEEE SIGHT enabled the establishment of three electronics hobby labs in underserved schools in Assam and West Bengal. The E-HuTS (electronic hobby clubs for technical development in rural schools) labs became permanent areas where students learn, experiment, and innovate.
The inauguration ceremony for the E-HuTS was a milestone moment. To further inspire students, Mrinal Mandal, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at IIT Kharagpur, gave a motivational talk in Bengali. The immediate outcome was that a group of students built a smart home using Arduino and wireless communication modules—something they never imagined they could do.
A similar transformation unfolded in Assam, where the TTB program was conducted entirely in the Assamese language, ensuring inclusivity for students with limited exposure to English. After completing the program, students proudly displayed their IEEE certificates.
One of the best aspects of the Assam program was the overwhelming participation of female students. Many of the young women were interacting with electronics for the first time—an inspiring step toward reducing gender disparity in the STEM field.
The more than 85 students who joined the hobby clubs in Assam and West Bengal developed almost three dozen projects including sensor-based alarms and environmental monitoring systems. The innovations weren’t replicas; they were original student-driven designs developed under the guidance of an IEEE mentor.
The initiative received a mention in the 2022 IEEE annual report and in an article in The Institute about the 2022 IEEE Education Week activities.
To ensure measurable progress of the program, the TTB team also implemented an evaluation matrix inspired by IEEE Humanitarian Technologies Board guidelines. The spreadsheet tracked outputs including the number of workshops held, hours delivered, and tools provided. It also measured results such as skills development, knowledge retention, student engagement, and long-term interest.
The structured methodology made the project replicable and transparent, providing a framework for future STEM outreach efforts.
The momentum from those initiatives helped spark the creation of IEEE communities in India. In 2023 the IEEE student branch at Dibrugarh University in Assam was formed, followed in 2024 by the university’s IEEE Microwave Theory and Technology Society student branch chapter. The groups have become centers of volunteer activity, ensuring long-term sustainability.
This year the TTB team organized TechnoFest: Udhvav 2.0, which brought engineers, scientists, lecturers, and members of the IEEE Young Professionals group together with students in the region. For many participants, it was their first opportunity to interact with real innovators and role models, turning the festival into an energizing platform of inspiration and exposure for rural youth.
Also in 2023, thanks to a grant from the IEEE MTT-S Ambassador program, IEEE volunteers visited Vidhya: The Living School, in Dhemaji. The session took place outdoors that October amid breathtaking natural landscapes, demonstrating that learning thrives even outside of a traditional infrastructure.
Another important milestone came in 2024, when the IEEE MTT-S SIGHT group provided a grant of US $1,000 to the school for its Vidhya Shakti project to install solar panels to provide uninterrupted and sustainable power to the school.
The student ambassadors met several distinguished figures who have made notable contributions to STEM education in India. They included Pranjal Buragohain, founder of the Vidhya school; chemical scientist Binoy Kumar Saikia, a recipient of the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Award for Science and Technology in India; and astronomer Kishor Baruah, known for creating programs for visually impaired students.
Another heartwarming stop was at the Tai Phake School near Naharkatya, where one of the first E-HuTS labs was established in 2022.
The initiative has grown far beyond its original mission. It now:
What began with a few breadboards and LEDs is now shaping the future of budding engineers across India. More than 100 students have been affected, dozens of projects have been built, and schools now have functioning electronics labs. New IEEE student branches have sprung to life, and communities once isolated from STEM education are becoming part of the growing technological landscape.
The journey continues, driven by connection, compassion, and the belief that every student, no matter where they live, deserves access to quality STEM education.