The students in Mr. Smoot’s science class in 1957 in the Lewis School in Birmingham, Ala., might not have seen Sputnik or heard its beeping, but they felt its presence.

“We stopped having throwaway science and started having real science,” recalled Shirley Malcolm, one of the students. “Here I was, a black kid in a segregated school that was under-resourced — Sputnik kind of crossed the barrier. All of a sudden everybody was talking about it, and science was above the fold in the newspaper, and my teachers went to institutes and really got us all engaged. It was just a time of incredible intensity and attention to science.”

For many, Sputnik was proof that American education, particularly in science, had fallen behind. Scientists and engineers warned Congress that the cold war was being fought with slide rules, not rifles. In response Congress passed the National Defense Education Act in 1958, providing, among other things, college scholarships and other help for aspiring scientists, engineers and mathematicians. Meanwhile, some of the nation’s eminent scientists were collaborating on new ways to teach high school physics, biology and chemistry.

“Those were heady times,” recalled Gerald F. Wheeler, who as a young high school physics teacher participated in workshops on one of these plans, the Physical Sciences Study Committee’s curriculum for physics. Its ideas were so fresh they were presented on mimeographed sheets rather than printed pages. “It was very high-energy networking,” he said. “Science teachers trying to do a much better job teaching.”