Creating a New Engineering Design Build for 4th-6th Grade Students
In late fall 2012, I created an engineering design build for elementary school students to teach them about estimation, design, physics, and life cycle thinking. I did the hour-long activity with 4 different classrooms in Massachusetts, getting feedback from students and teachers and using that feedback to iterate. The activity begins with a hands-on active discussion about the environmental impact of cars, which is dominated by the impact of fuel. Students discover that to make cars with much lower impact, the fuel source needs to change. Then, students get 45 minutes on a team to plan, build, test, and share a wind-powered vehicle made using a limited budget for materials. Material "costs" are in units of environmental impact, so the build is tied to the initial discussion. Feedback from the fourth iteration showed that students were learning what I had hoped and planning to share what they learned with family and friends. My activity is listed on TeachersPayTeachers.com as a free download.
Mentoring a Design Build Team at the Boston Museum of Science
In summer 2012, I mentored a team of high school students from programs like MIT's Minority Introduction to Engineering and Science (MITES) program, who built a mechanical windmill that lifted a trash can several feet off the ground! I encouraged them to approach the problem methodically, create a full prototype early on and test it, find issues with their prototype and iterate, and be creative.
Mentoring a FIRST Robotics Team in Milwaukee, WI
In fall 2011, I mentored a middle school FIRST robotics team, who over several months built and programmed a robot that could navigate an obstacle course and complete missions. As the only engineer on their mentoring team, I taught them basic engineering concepts like how to approach a programming problem, ideation, and the importance of iteration and testing. I also shared with them the real life context for the problems they were facing, comparing them to what I was doing at work.
Mentoring Fellow Students at Olin College
In this photo, I'm pouring water on a structure built by admission candidates at Olin's Candidate's Weekend. Olin students start doing projects from day 1 of their engineering education, so being a course assistant is a rather involved role. As a course assistant for the first-year course called Modeling and Control: Engineering of Compartmentalized Systems, I helped younger students get a grasp of basic controls concepts and circuits. I also helped them with their final project, in which they attempted to control the release of a ball on a pendulum so it would land on a target.
I was also a course assistant for the first iteration of Computing and Craft, a course that blended Arduino programming with crafty projects like light-up clothes that changed their color pattern based on music. I helped design the course, aided students in their search for well-scoped projects, and helped students with their Arduino programming.
Additionally I was a course assistant for a new upper level design course at Olin called Design of Energy Systems. The course taught students to design their own experiments to test different aspects of renewable energy sources and culminates in a large final project. My role is to help students find the right sensors to run their experiments, answer questions and point them to resources, and continue to design the details of the course taking student feedback into account.
I was also a course assistant for the first iteration of Computing and Craft, a course that blended Arduino programming with crafty projects like light-up clothes that changed their color pattern based on music. I helped design the course, aided students in their search for well-scoped projects, and helped students with their Arduino programming.
Additionally I was a course assistant for a new upper level design course at Olin called Design of Energy Systems. The course taught students to design their own experiments to test different aspects of renewable energy sources and culminates in a large final project. My role is to help students find the right sensors to run their experiments, answer questions and point them to resources, and continue to design the details of the course taking student feedback into account.
