Educational Outreach

BIGSTEP : Broader Impact from Graduate Students Transferring Engineering Principles

I participated in the BIGSTEP program through a fellowship from the National Science Foundation in conjunction with the Johns Hopkins University Center for Educational Outreach. This program involved working with faculty from the university, participating schools and many individuals from several organizations dedicated to supporting educational outreach. We worked together to develop and maintain programs to encourage student to pursue higher education in STEM fields. Through this program I attended many events, including a Project 2061 workshop at AAAS and the Tapia Conference where got to know several undergraduate AISES members (and hopefully convinced a couple to go to grad school). I also became involved with several programs at local high schools. BIGSTEP was also a great opportunity for me to meet people who have experience in educational outreach and are willing to help me in my endeavors.

Inventors of the Future

The Inventors of the Future program allows high school students to become inventors. In this program I worked with John Zimmerman the vice principal of the Washington Mathematics Science Technology Public Charter High School in Washington D.C. to involve students in the program. Fellow graduate student Eric Lewandowski and I worked to organize events for the program, assessment surveys and materials, organized mentors for the students, reviewed the projects and were judges for the final event.

This program is also sponsored by the National Inventor's Hall of Fame, and we were lucky enough to have two members who also participated in this event, James West and George Carruthers. James West is the inventor of the electret microphone (found in almost every cell phone and innumerable electronic devices). George Carruthers is the inventor of the Far Ultraviolet Electrographic Camera (best known for its use on the Apollo 16 mission to the Moon in 1972). It was great to see that these individuals as well as people from NSF, AAAS and ONR took time to become involved in this program. I think they were all as impressed as I was by the creativity of the students.

Sensor Networks Project

The goal of this project was to create a nation-wide network to communicate environmental data between middle schools, high schools and universities. Initially, we choose two locations with very different environments, an inner city school in Baltimore City and three rural schools in northern Minnesota. In the first year of the program a sensor network using Crossbow Motes was deployed, led by Sam Small at Baltimore Polytechnic School. Sam created a great website describing the deployment. In addition to the crossbow motes, we developed a LEGO component of the project. I led the LEGO aspects of the project. The idea was to allow students to program LEGO Mindstorm RCX bricks to act as a single node in the sensor network. We provided the schools with LEGO Mindstorm sets and the several sensors (temperature, light, humidity). In addition, I directed the Michael Halgonnie in his Summer Research Experience (sponsored by AISES). We worked together to create a tutorial for the teachers on everything from installing the software to taking measurements via the RCX bricks to writing a program to sample data at given intervals.

Through this work I had the privilege of taking multiple trips to Minnesota to visit the Bimidji Middle School in Bimidji MN and two Native American schools located on Ojibwe Reservations, Red Lake School in Red Lake and the Bugonaygeshig Tribal School in Leech Lake. I immensely enjoyed my time at the schools and was impressed by the balance of culture and education in the Native American schools.

The teachers from Minnesota and the graduate students in the BIGSTEP program made time for some socializing as well. We took a couple canoeing trips, visited the headwaters of the Mississippi river, and even had a big game feast (a couple of the teachers are avid hunters in their spare time).

Here are a few students at the pow-wow I attended held at the Bugonaygeshig Tribal School. The teachers, students and their parents regularly attend pow-wows at the school led by the Elders of the tribe. The students in this picture are preparing wild rice using traditional techniques in a structure they built. The teachers pose problems in math and science based on these activities.