Virginia Secretary of Education Anne Holton visited Sutherland Middle School on Thursday, May 22, 2014. There eighth-grade science students in Robert Munsey’s class used source documents from the Smithsonian Institution and a 3D printer to build a scaled-down replica of Samuel F.B. Morse’s telegraph.
Secretary Holton transmitted the telegraph’s first message—”STEM rocks”.
On the receiving end of the wires with a similar telegraph, 5th-graders at nearby Hollymead Elementary deciphered the code of dots and dashes to spell the acronym for Science, Technology, Engineering and Math.