The Electrifying Edison

At Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School in Washington, children in Natosh Jones' third-grade class bend over model cars designed to run on solar power. Working with a team of professional scientists from NASA and other federal agencies, they're putting finishing touches on the cars. With a student body that is almost totally minority and predominantly poor, Martin Luther King is the kind of American public school that has too often failed its students, especially in science and mathematics. But today Jones' students are learning the way all trainee scientists should: hands-on, through the sort of dogged trial and error that has always been the preface to American invention, a method Thomas Edison helped pioneer. "I like it this way because I get to learn how to do things, and when people ask me what I'm doing, I can show them how I'm doing it," says 8-year-old Sinia Stewart. "It makes me want to make other things that you can do in science."

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