Outreach

Researchers at CU Boulder land NSF Award for air and soil quality education

Anonymous — Tue, 19 Sep 2023 15:26:22 +0000

Researchers at CU Boulder land NSF Award for air and soil quality education Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 09/19/2023 - 09:26

Michael Lock Swingen

Researchers at CU Boulder have received a prestigious NSF Award to teach students in rural K-12 schools around Colorado about air and soil quality monitoring. And with additional funding from a University of Colorado Boulder Outreach Award and a DEI Working Group Action Grant from the Paul M. Rady Department of Mechanical Engineering, they look to expand their partnership with K-12 schools in Mongolia, as well.

Cofounded by Professor Michael Hannigan and Associate Research Professor Daniel Knight, the outreach program is called the Colorado Science and Engineering Inquiry Collaborative and works in conjunction with the Mechanical Engineering course MCEN 4/5291, Project Based Learning in Rural Schools. The outreach program trains, supports and places CU students in underserved rural high schools that struggle to attract science teachers and have little engineering education available.

Hannigan and Knight work in collaboration with Professor Joseph Polman, the associate dean for research in the CU Boulder School of Education, and Angela Bielefeldt, a professor in Civil, Environment and Architectural Engineering. They plan to use a total of $457,531 in funding to expand their programming and services for the upcoming academic year.

“This is the seventh concurrent year that we received an Outreach Award,” Knight said. “We have a lot of passion for this project.”

Project Based Learning in Rural Schools works with 13 K-12 schools, half of which are based in the Western Slope area in Colorado. Other areas in the state include the San Luis Valley and the plains in northeastern Colorado. Along with the expansion of their partnerships with K-12 schools in Mongolia, Hannigan and Knight plan to begin working with Pueblo East High School, where the majority of students are Hispanic/Latino and potentially first generation college students. With the help of this year’s funding, they plan to begin translating their engineering curriculum into Spanish.

Project Based Learning in Rural Schools is a full-year course for CU Boulder students. The students will spend the fall semester improving their teaching skills and learning how to teach the outreach program’s hands-on curriculum to the K-12 students later in the spring semester. There is also a summer program focused on summer camps for K-12 students that is open to participants in the course.

“I have been really impressed with how the organization and design of this unique educational outreach program provides a quality learning experience for both CU engineering students and high school students at rural schools throughout the state,” Polman said.

The core of the course curriculum is based around air and soil quality monitors, which are known as “Pods,” and were developed in the Hannigan Laboratory. The air quality Pods measure aerosols, along with particulate matter, or PM, which are minute particles suspended in the atmosphere and account for a specific form of air pollution. Inhalable PM, which is less than 10 microns in diameter (PM₁₀), and fine PM (PM_2.5), which is less than 2.5 microns in diameter, are both known for their negative effects on human health and the environment. The soil quality Pods measure temperature, moisture, carbon dioxide and light.

Equipped with these monitors, CU Boulder students will visit the K-12 schools in the spring. For the first trip, the CU Boulder students will teach the highschoolers how to take measurements with the monitor and mentor them as they use the monitors to engage in inquiry-based learning projects, which allow K-12 students to ask and answer their own air and soil quality questions in their local community.

“There's something about getting your hands on a project that teaches you so much more,” said Shreya Venkatesh, a third-year engineering graduate student who is involved in the outreach program. “These kids come up with an original question, and then they test it with the materials we give them and the knowledge we teach them in a couple of weeks. They get involved. And there's just something about that process that’s so much more rewarding than just listening to a lecture and then doing an assignment.”

Some students decide to place the monitors around coal mines to measure its emissions, while others put them around landfills, feed lots or other agricultural settings.

“But other students come up with projects that I never would have thought of,” Knight said. “One student looked at the emissions from a PlayStation console. Another slept with a dog in his room, the next night with two dogs, and the third with three, and looked at the differences. And a lot of projects had to do with snowmobiles, four-wheelers and other outdoor projects like that.”

“At the end of the year, the rural high school students present their projects at a symposium,” Hannigan added. “They are often proud of their projects, so it is fun to see that. It’s also so cool to see those high school students looking to our students for guidance and mentoring. Our CU students shine.”

The Mongolian Chapter of the outreach program is facilitated by a partner NGO, Public Lab Mongolia. Like their American counterparts in Colorado, college students at the National University of Mongolia engage in a similar role with Mongolian high schools. With the help of the new funding, Hannigan and Knight plan to integrate the two groups of university students through Zoom meetings. Once paired up, U.S. and Mongolian mentors will facilitate the sharing of school project ideas and results. Ultimately, Hannigan and Knight plan to create a summer camp in Mongolia during the summer of 2024, where the two teams will meet face-to-face for team partnership development.

“I’m really excited to see the project and research expanding with the new NSF grant, and a more extensive program in Mongolia,” Polman said. “This will allow us to further explore the impact of culture and place on inquiry-based learning."

Researchers at CU Boulder have received a prestigious NSF Award to teach students in rural K-12 schools around Colorado about air and soil quality monitoring.

Off

Traditional

White

Jayaram part of team that earns Outreach Award for STEM education

Anonymous — Wed, 23 Aug 2023 19:13:32 +0000

Jayaram part of team that earns Outreach Award for STEM education Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 08/23/2023 - 13:13

Michael Lock Swingen

Assistant Professor Kaushik Jayaram is part of an interdisciplinary team who have received a University of Colorado Boulder Outreach Award for their efforts to get the next generation of STEM programming into rural K-12 schools in Colorado.

New science standards in Colorado require students to learn by working through problems rather than memorizing facts. These new standards, based on Next Generation Science Standards, represent a significant change in what students will be expected to know and how science teachers will teach.

To address these changing needs, Jayaram and his team want to develop a bioinspired robotics toolkit and an accompanying curriculum that will emphasize real-world problem-solving and hands-on learning. They call it “Build a Better Bug.”

The team brings together a diversity of disciplines. Along with Jayaram, Alexandra Rose of the Ecology and Evolutionary Department will help lead the team. Distinguished Professor William Penuel of the School of Education, Nathan McNeill, Stacey Forsyth and Scott Sieke will also lend their expertise in education.

The toolkits are inspired by Jayaram’s research in his Animal Inspired Movement and Robotics Laboratory, where Jayaram and his research team study concepts from biology and apply them to the design of real-world engineered systems. In his lab, you can find robots modeled after the body morphologies of cockroaches and spiders.

“We are fundamentally interested in understanding why animals are the way they are,” said Jayaram, “and how we can build bioinspired robots that can address social needs, like search and rescue, environmental monitoring or even use them during surgery.”

The toolkits will give middle school students a chance to combine biology and robotics in their own ways. The kits will feature origami-based foldable body and appendage designs that are inspired by a variety of insects, such as cockroach legs, ladybug wings or mantis claws.

After combining and rearranging parts to make their own unique bug, the students will use Python/Arduino-compatible open-source electronics to drive the robot and its biologically inspired sensors. Also, the students will have a Chromebook-compatible app to program, communicate and play with their designs.

While building and interacting with their robot bugs, students will probe the underlying principles of what makes certain species evolutionarily successful and how we could perhaps learn from those insights.

“I love the opportunity to work at the intersection of biology and engineering,” Rose said. "And I hope to co-opt students’ excitement about robots to get them secretly learning about topics as seemingly diverse as physics, physiology, evolution, and the engineering design process.”

By leveraging CU’s partnership with Colorado Mesa University, Jayaram and his cohort plan to target an audience in a more rural part of the state to pilot the project. Also, they plan to work with the Eureka McConnel Science Museum in Grand Junction, which runs educational and youth camps and served 26,682 learners in 2022 alone.

“We want our primary audience to be students who don’t have ready access to the exciting science and engineering happening at CU,” Jayaram said. “That includes students who live away from the urban centers of our state.”

Jayaram also hopes the project can address gender biases in STEM through the way in which it bridges robotics with so many other different disciplines.

As Jayaram and his cohort pilot “Build a Better Bug,” they plan to collect feedback from both students and teachers. Through photos, student-made videos, interviews and reflection exercises, they will fine-tune the toolkits and accompanying curriculum for future iterations.

“We are excited to field-test these materials and believe that they will create impactful learning experiences for students,” Jayaram said.

Jayaram and his collaborators are actively looking for talented undergraduate and graduate students who would like to contribute to the project. If you have experience in computer science and electronics and are interested in education and outreach, don’t hesitate to reach out: Kaushik.jayaram@colorado.edu.

Off

Traditional

White

CU Boulder students get high schoolers excited about STEM fields through outreach event

Anonymous — Thu, 10 Aug 2023 19:47:10 +0000

CU Boulder students get high schoolers excited about STEM fields through outreach event Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 08/10/2023 - 13:47

Michael Lock Swingen

By engaging with high schoolers through hands-on learning and real-world problem solving, graduate students in mechanical engineering are aspiring to get younger generations excited about STEM fields.

Through a partnership between the K-12 Outreach Group and Arrupe Jesuit High School in Denver, a group of graduate students recently visited the high school to lead an engineering project with first-year students. The high schoolers then made a fieldtrip to the CU Boulder campus to visit a handful of research labs.

“We try to encourage students to think about science and engineering as a career opportunity,” K-12 Outreach leader and graduate student Shreya Venkatesh said. “But we also want to show them that engineering is more than planes, trains and automobiles. It’s about human health, too.”

The high schoolers had to build a prosthetic leg and test its durability. Venkatesh and other graduate students gave lectures on principles like stress, strain and strength, while also giving them some design models from which to base their own prototype.

By using materials like cardboard, wooden dowels, tape and zip ties, the student teams built their own prosthetic leg according to their own decision-making processes and design strategies.

“They’re learning as much about teamwork as they’re learning about engineering,” Arrupe physics teacher Jesus Tiscareno said.

The student teams then tested their designs by seeing how far they could walk on it along a hallway and up a flight of stairs.

“Rather than just having students read some material and try to understand ideas that way, it’s best to demonstrate it,” Tiscareno said. “Actions speak louder than words.”

Arrupe serves students with limited economic resources in Denver. The independent school focuses on building community partnerships by having students intern at local businesses one day per week.

The K-12 Outreach Group considers itself part of the school’s community-building ethos and has been working with Arrupe Jesuit High School since summer 2021, when the high schoolers built mouse trap race cars. Last year, they built insect-inspired robots and learned the basics of coding.

After this year’s students tested the durability of their prosthetic legs, they visited the CU Boulder campus to see what engineering research looks like in real life and get a feel for what it’s like to be a college student as well.

They visited Alaa Ahmed’s Neuromechanics Lab, Alena Grabowski’s Applied Biomechanic’s Lab, Robert MacCurdy’s Matter Assembly Lab and Kaushik Jayaram’s Animal Inspired Movement and Robotics Laboratory.

While testing out a lot of the equipment in the labs, the first-year high schoolers learned that engineering is a lot more than gears, cogs and wheels.

“A lot of the students said they had fun building their prosthetic legs and visiting the labs,” Venkatesh said. “One student said they learned engineering isn’t for them, but they also learned they could go to college. And that’s just as big of a win as anything else.”

Off

Traditional

White

Triple E Fair introduces 180 middle schoolers to the wonders of engineering

Anonymous — Fri, 07 Apr 2023 21:38:49 +0000

Triple E Fair introduces 180 middle schoolers to the wonders of engineering Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 04/07/2023 - 15:38

Michael Lock Swingen

180 middle schoolers from STEM Launch in Thornton, Colorado, had the chance to see first-hand how awe-inspiring engineering can be, thanks to an outreach fair organized by the Paul M. Rady Department of Mechanical Engineering.

Off

Traditional

White

Faces of Engaged Scholarship: Aniya Khalili

Anonymous — Tue, 19 Apr 2022 14:17:07 +0000

Faces of Engaged Scholarship: Aniya Khalili Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 04/19/2022 - 08:17

PhD student Aniya Khalili was looking for a research lab that would match her values. She found that match in 2019 with Professor Shelly Miller and was introduced to the practice of community-engaged scholarship.

Off

Traditional

White

Michael Hannigan and Daniel Knight earn Outreach Award for K-12 soil quality education

Anonymous — Mon, 18 Apr 2022 19:26:16 +0000

Michael Hannigan and Daniel Knight earn Outreach Award for K-12 soil quality education Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 04/18/2022 - 13:26

Rachel Leuthauser

Professor Michael Hannigan and Research Associate Daniel Knight.

Department of Mechanical Engineering faculty have received another University of Colorado Boulder Outreach Award for their work with rural K-12 schools in Colorado.

Department Chair Michael Hannigan and Research Associate Daniel Knight will be using the $24,000 grant to expand their outreach program that educates K-12 students about air quality and emissions. They are conducting the work with Professor Joseph Polman, the Associate Dean for Research in the School of Education.

The Soil Quality InQuiry (SQIQ) project will allow students from five Western Colorado schools in the Delta County, Mesa Country Valley 51 and Lone Star districts to conduct their own soil quality research. CU Boulder will provide the curriculum, soil quality monitors, and student mentors from College of Engineering and Applied Science to support the K-12 classes.

SQIQ will begin in fall 2022, when CU Boulder mentors enroll in the program. Then in November, the soil quality monitors will be delivered to the five high schools.

Mentors will help the students with their soil quality projects during monthly visits in spring 2023. SQIQ will culminate with the high schoolers presenting their projects with scientific posters at school symposiums in March or April.

The goal of SQIQ is to enrich STEM education opportunities in underserved rural K-12 schools. Hannigan and Knight explained that many of these rural areas struggle to attract science teachers and have little engineering education available to students.

SQIQ also provides opportunities to connect with community members in these rural areas such as farmers, ranchers, coal miners and local businesses – each of whom are stakeholders in the push for cleaner air.

Hannigan and Knight also plan to connect with government agencies such as the Bureau of Land Management, environmental organizations like the Western Slope Conservation Center, and student development organizations such as Contigo that supports immigrant families.

Other partners on this project include faculty and students from Western Colorado University and Colorado Mesa University, since both partner universities are closer to the targeted school districts.

SQIQ is an expansion of the group’s ongoing outreach projects titled “Air Quality Inquiry Program” (AQ-IQ) and “Science-Engineering Inquiry Collaborative in Rural Colorado” (SCENIC), which both aim to create pathways for STEM education in rural Colorado. AQ-IQ based projects have received an Outreach Award every year since 2018.

On top of being awarded another grant this year, Knight will also be the speaker at the Office for Outreach and Engagement’s annual awards banquet in April 2022.

Department Chair Michael Hannigan and Research Associate Daniel Knight will be using the $24,000 grant to expand their outreach program that engages K-12 students to conduct their own soil quality research.

Off

Traditional

White

Mechanical engineering team presents innovative solution to fight climate change, win funding

Anonymous — Wed, 09 Mar 2022 18:45:12 +0000

Mechanical engineering team presents innovative solution to fight climate change, win funding Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 03/09/2022 - 11:45

Senior design team Urchin Merchants, who placed fourth, hope to market a specialized suction device to divers and conservation groups that could help save kelp forests off the coast of California and ecosystems around the world from exploding purple sea urchin populations.

Off

Traditional

White

Triple E Fair introduces 117 middle schoolers to mechanical engineering

Anonymous — Thu, 03 Mar 2022 20:45:48 +0000

Triple E Fair introduces 117 middle schoolers to mechanical engineering Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 03/03/2022 - 13:45

Rachel Leuthauser

The Early Engineering Exposure Fair, organized by mechanical engineering graduate students, was comprised of 16 interactive exhibits to demonstrate diverse engineering fields such as air quality, wind energy, robotics and microfluids.

Off

Traditional

White

Graduate students host high schoolers for engineering outreach event

Anonymous — Fri, 25 Feb 2022 19:12:12 +0000

Graduate students host high schoolers for engineering outreach event Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 02/25/2022 - 12:12

Rachel Leuthauser

110

HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS

ROBOTS BUILT

Learn more about CEME

Graduate students in mechanical engineering are aspiring to get younger generations excited about the field. The Committee for Equity in Mechanical Engineering (CEME) is accomplishing that goal by engaging with high schoolers in a manner that is similar to their own education – with hands-on learning.

On Tuesday, February 15, CEME invited 110 freshmen from Arrupe Jesuit High School to campus, where they built insect-inspired robots and toured the Integrated Teaching and Learning Laboratory (ITLL). It gave those high schoolers the chance to see what life is like as an engineering student.

"I think the best part is to connect with the students and show them that they too can pursue STEM," CEME member Rosa Morales said. "I love speaking Spanish with them, demonstrating that we are not very different from one another and showing that if I could do it, they could too. I also love to hear them say 'that was so easy' after they've completed the projects we put together! I feel like these projects show them that they really can do STEM."

Arrupe Jesuit serves economically disadvantaged students from Denver's inner-city neighborhoods. The school focuses on community partnerships to better overcome the challenges of servicing urban communities. CEME has stepped up be one of those valuable friendships.

CEME has been working with Arrupe Jesuit High School since summer 2021, when the group visited the school and built mouse trap race cars to demonstrate the fundamentals of engineering. The success of that event is what inspired the graduate students to plan the field trip to campus.

Since CEME knew they wanted ongoing interaction with the high schoolers, the visit was step one in a two-part project. On campus, the high schoolers built 30 insect-inspired robots with a focus on the hardware component of the devices. Step two involves CEME members going back to Arrupe Jesuit High School to teach the students about the software component. The graduate student volunteers will instruct the high schoolers on building basic code for the robots.

"Seeing them get excited about the simple stuff that I still geek out about is so fun," said Brennan Moeller, one of the graduate student volunteers.

CEME members and the graduate student volunteers hope this work impacts how the freshmen high schoolers envision their futures. Volunteer Brittany Nixon added that the best part of these events is "connecting with the kids, seeing them get excited about science and engineering, and encouraging them."

The Committee for Equity in Mechanical Engineering invited freshmen from Arrupe Jesuit High School to campus, where they built robots and toured the Integrated Teaching and Learning Laboratory.

Off

Traditional

White

Mechanical engineering students competing in national wind energy competition

Anonymous — Thu, 17 Feb 2022 22:58:11 +0000

Mechanical engineering students competing in national wind energy competition Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 02/17/2022 - 15:58

Rachel Leuthauser

A group of mechanical engineering seniors will be the first University of Colorado Boulder team to compete in the U.S. Department of Energy’s Collegiate Wind Competition (CWC) – an event in which future engineers are challenged to find a unique solution to a wind energy project.

Wind Team Members

Aaron Schwan - Systems Engineer
Alec Kostovny - Logistics Manager
Anika Levy - Manufacturing Engineer
Erik Feiereisen - Electro-mechanical Engineer
Claire Isenhart - Project Manager
Charles Candon - Test Engineer
Graham Blanco - CAD Engineer
Kiro Gerges - Electro-mechanical Engineer
Luke Walker - Electro-mechanical Engineer
Simon Grzebien - Financial Engineer

Header image: The 2021 team's prototype, which the 2022 team is drawing inspiration from.

CU Boulder’s Wind Team, founded in Senior Design, won its spot in the competition because of the students’ successful preliminary design and plans. The group first entered the event as a learn-along team, which meant they could participate but not be in the running for the actual competition.

For the 2022 competition, organizers decided to open one spot for a learn-along team. They recognized the CU Boulder Senior Design Wind Team’s hard work and promoted the group to the full competition, which will happen May 16-19 in San Antonio, Texas.

“When we were being graded as a learn-along team last semester, we really didn’t know if we were going to make it or not,” said Claire Isenhart, the team’s project manager. “Then we found out in January that we actually won the first phase against other learn-along teams. It will be a great opportunity for us.”

Each team is tasked with multiple projects as part of the CWC, since the multidisciplinary competition aims to prepare students for all parts of the wind industry. These projects include building an offshore wind turbine prototype, developing a site plan for a hypothetical wind farm and partnering with industry professionals and K-12 educational programs to raise awareness of wind energy in their community.

Teams competing in the CWC will be judged and receive points for each of these three individual projects. Teams with the top three highest combined scores will win first, second and third place, respectively.

Claire Isenhart getting a progress report from her team members.

Members of the team taking measurements for their design.

Students working on a a piece of their design.

The Senior Design Wind Team is already making progress. They have completed preliminary design reports for the wind farm and plan to visit a middle school in March to get young people excited about wind energy. The team’s financial engineer, Simon Grzebien, said they are making advances with their turbine prototype as well.

“We just started making our parts for the prototype in the machine shop,” Grzebien said. “We haven’t had any issues so far, but I’m sure there will be challenges that pop up. Our team feels prepared.”

Each of the students on the Senior Design Wind Team earned their place in the group. Students had to apply and interview with team director Roark Lanning to be accepted. A key piece of being offered a position was an interest in wind energy, since a core component of the competition is assessing real-world research questions surrounding the industry.

“I do want to pursue a career in the field,” Isenhart said. “I knew I wanted to work in clean energy, but I wasn’t sure how I wanted to do that until my sophomore year when I was part of the Discovery Learning Apprenticeship. I researched ways to cool wind turbine generators and methods to produce wind turbine parts. I thought that was such a cool project and I discovered I was interested in the materials.”

Her team members have similar career goals to help the world run off a cleaner source of energy. Luke Walker, one of the team’s electro-mechanical engineers, said he intends to devote his career to climate-change mitigation by using carbon-free energy technologies.

“This project provides the opportunity to study how wind energy, one of the most prolific clean-energy solutions, is accomplished from an engineering and logistical standpoint,” Walker said. “Working with wind energy is without a doubt the best way to learn about the challenges that face large-scale deployment of many forms of renewable energy.”

Erik Feiereisen, another electro-mechanical engineer on the team, added that he is interested in learning about how kinetic energy from the wind is transferred into usable electrical energy.

“It can power most everything in our lives,” Feiereisen said. “I found this project to be an interesting engineering challenge and look forward to seeing what all we can accomplish by the end of the year.”

The Senior Design Wind Team has also recruited students from outside the mechanical engineering undergraduate program to bring more perspectives to these complex projects. The team has brought on civil engineering and graduate-level mechanical engineering students to assist with their designs.

Isenhart said collaborating with these students has helped the team come up with more interdisciplinary solutions to wind energy challenges, which is what each team member will also need to do in their future careers.

In 2020-21, the first CU Boulder Senior Design Wind Team participated in the CWC as a learn-along team but did not compete in the full competition. Learn more about that team’s design and plans.

Explore all 2021-22 Senior Design Projects

The group of mechanical engineering seniors is the first University of Colorado Boulder team to compete in the U.S. Department of Energy’s Collegiate Wind Competition (CWC) – an event in which future engineers are challenged to find a unique solution to a wind energy project.

Off

Traditional

White