On any given Saturday, you might find Morgan Quinn Ross, an assistant professor of emerging media and technology at Oregon State University, deep in the mountainous woods, sans phone, on a solo run. “People generally know that I do it, so if I die, I would like to think that they would find me ...

As a high-achieving college kid, Alex Vallejo wasn’t surprised by the kind of young people he met at the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers’ national conference in Salt Lake City three years ago. Like him, there were other computer-science students who were in their school robotics cl...