If you’re trying to infuse snack making with physics’ lessons, this would be the way to do it. You can find the complete instructions and explaination via the instructables website. Or, let a 10 year old demonstrate.
Archive for the ‘Education’ Category
How To Measure the Speed of Light with a Chocolate Bar.
Posted by Sheri on September 11th, 2008 | No Comments »
Filed under Education
UT-Austin Students Collaborate With Indian Counterparts on Third World E-learning
Posted by Dylan on August 25th, 2008 | No Comments »
Engineering Students at the University of Texas at Austin recently worked with students at a university in southwest India on the already well known One Laptop per Child program. Five Seniors in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering (ECE) at UT-Austin collaborated together in two teams with five students at Amrita University in developing a prototypical solar charger for the computer, along with power management software, and in developing a low bandwidth e-learning system for delivering lectures to students in remote areas. The e-learning system will continue to be worked on in the coming year by a new team, while students who participated in the program last year credit it with helping improve communication and teamwork skills.
The senior design sequence is designed to help ensure that students graduating with an ECE degree are adequately prepared to enter an international workforce and become part of teams working on complex projects. This two-semester sequence teaches students skills such as risk and project management and allows them to explore professional-grade tools for capturing their designs and supporting the collaboration. In addition to the multi-institutional option, senior design projects can also be multi-disciplinary, leading, for example, to teams that blend EE and mechanical engineering students.
During the pilot offering of the multi-institutional senior design option, five students at UT and five students at Amrita University in southwest India divided into two cross-institutional teams. Both teams targeted the One Laptop Per Child platform. One team developed the prototype for a solar charger with power management software. The other team developed the prototype of a low-bandwidth e-learning system designed to deliver lectures to remote locations in third-world countries. A new multi-institutional team will continue work on the e-learning system during the 2008-2009 academic year. A participant in the pilot offering reports, “This project taught me how to deal with an international team. Dealing with the cultural, lingual, and time differences made me more confident and improved my communication skills. We got to know the people in India and became a wonderful team with great spirit and enthusiasm.”
Filed under Education, Global | Tags: appropriate technology, computer engineering, Electrical Engineering, engineering education, technology, undergraduate engineering projects
UW Engineering Students Design Plan to Save Library
Posted by Dylan on August 20th, 2008 | No Comments »
As future generations turn through the pages of books at the Monroe Street Library in Madison, Wisconsin, they will have the students of Mike Oliva’s “Special Topics in Engineering” class to thank. Earlier in the year, in response to rising energy costs and a budget shortfall, library officials suggested closing or reducing the open hours at the nearly 50 year-old library. Enter Oliva’s University of Wisconsin engineering class.
The students looked at the building, and found numerous areas where energy efficiency could be improved, ranging from fluorescent light bulbs and double pane windows to placing insulation in the walls. The improvements would result in savings as high as $900 a year, and would save even more in coming years, as energy prices are expected to soar to even higher levels. UW Engineering Students Design Plan to Save Library
Filed under Education, Society | Tags: green engineering
Creative Engineering
Posted by Sheri on August 15th, 2008 | No Comments »
New York University Tisch School of Art Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) is the art department of tomorrow. It is made up of a living community of technologists, theorists, engineers, designers, and artists. Together they create alternative media projects that encompass creative design and artistic technology. There are many examples on their website of the types of projects these students create but here is an ideas of what to exspect. A inDOOR Energy Harvester, which makes use of peoples everyday actions to generate and store electricity and a solar bikini that “cools your beer and charges your ipod.”
Filed under Education, Society
UW-Madison engineering students improve Ecuador water quality
Posted by Sheri on August 7th, 2008 | No Comments »
An article recently appeared in the UW-Madison news featuring three civil and environmental engineering students from the University who where able to turn their senior design capstone project into a chance to create a new water pipe-line in Ecuador. These students, Jonathan Blanchard, Kevin Orner and David Tengler designed and implemented the water system after being inspired by their professor, Peter Bosscher. Bosscher had begun work on the pipe-line with UW-Madison Center for Global Health, but passed the project on to his students after being diagnosed with Kidney cancer. Although Bosscher lost his battle to the cancer, his memory will live on in the completed water-system. He was truly a role model to the students who he worked with, motivating them to think about the gloabl implications effective engineering solutions can have.
Filed under Education, Global | Tags: Engineers Without Boarders
Envirotech Tackles Literacy Challenges through Engineering
Posted by Administrator on July 30th, 2008 | No Comments »
Envirotech is a new program created by University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign engineers and Women in Engineering. It is based on the idea that student’s poor literacy skills create a lack of interest in STEM concepts.
“Proper understanding of scientific concepts frequently requires handling new vocabulary and written information. This presents a barrier to children with poor reading and language skills. As a result of these deficiencies, many students develop low self-confidence for information-intense subjects, and shy away from science and math despite strong interest in the underlying topics. International comparisons show U.S. students score lowest in language-intensive areas of science, e.g., biology.”
Envirotech creators make reading fun through environmental science. While students in the program are behind their peers in science, math and reading; they are very engaged in the the program. Envirotech allows students to make hands on connections to what they read, which keeps it interesting. The group also takes field trips, works with scientfic equitment, and talks to real environmental engineers.
You can read more about it in the article; You’re a fish…where would you rather live? posted in Engineering at Illinois News.
Filed under Education | Tags: Envirotech, science literacy
SMILE! There’s a new NSDL pathway
Posted by Administrator on July 28th, 2008 | No Comments »
If you are not familiar with The National Science Digital Library (NSDL) you probably should be. Created in 2000 by the National Science Foundation, this online library is free to use and provides exceptional resources for K-16 educators. Users can search the site and find not only text documents such as lesson plans and journal articles, but also images, video, audio, animations, software and datasets. NSDL is continually building on the site and has recently added a new pathway that will cater specifically to informal learning educators.
The new pathway, SMILE (The Science and Math Informal Learning Educators) will provide activities that fit with informal learning experiences and will be a useful resource for these educators. Across the country, organizations and especially museums are pulling their resources together to create curriculum that will supplement formal classroom learning experiences in STEM fields. The new site being created through NSF will combine these curriculum ideas into an easy searchable database, where participants can create, share, and rate informal STEM programs, lessons and demonstrations. SMILE is currently surveying museum professionals about their preferences for the new pathway.
Informal education differs from formal education in that it is not bound to learning standards and tests to measure performance. Informal educators are free to spend more time on a concept and take a more hands on approach then formal educators usually have the time or resources to.
Related: The NSDL engineering pathway, provided by the National Engineering Education Delivery System (NEEDS) and TeachEngineering, can be found here.
Filed under Education | Tags: Informal Education, NSDL, SMILE
Enhancing Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math Education Act of 2008
Posted by Sheri on July 22nd, 2008 | 3 Comments »
Back in May Rep. Mike Honda and Sen. Barack Obama came together and presented the Enhancing Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math Education Act of 2008 (full text). After federal funding for STEM fields has been increasingly cut over the last few years, such an act provides hope. Groups like the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) and the American Chemical Society have already come forward to show their support of the new policy effort. Now, other agencies are also standing up to back the legislation. One group The National Defense Industrial Association (NDIA) who also endorsed groups like “Project Lead the Way, FIRST Robotics, DoD STARBASE” has come out strongly behind the new STEM proposal. NDIA support makes it clear that efforts to improve STEM education are important to industry and other private sector companies. To quote the retired Air Force Lieutenant and current president and CEO of NDIA, General Larry Farrell, “The inability to hire a security-clearable, adequately educated work force of scientists, technologists, engineers, and mathematicians will be the single most economically crippling issue facing the US defense industrial base in the coming decades.” NDIA is urging House and Senate members to quickly act in supporting the bill.
Among some of the top goals of this bill would be to get states to adopt similar STEM education standards, currently standards are left to the state to decide and vary across the country. Moving to national STEM standards would ensure that children all across the United States are learning the same things in school. It would also allow standards and material to go through the federal President’s Office of Science and Technology Policy for review. A final goal of the bill is to target curriculum innovation by funding research that potentially can improve STEM education.
Related Links: NASA Announces 2008 Competitive Grant Programs Project Lead The Way
Filed under Education, Society, The National Interest | Tags: STEM legislation
Students Learn Technology and Science of Extreme Ocean Environments at Underwater Robot Competition
Posted by Sheri on July 17th, 2008 | 1 Comment »
At University of California San Diego’s (UCSD) Canyonview Aquatic Center, teams of students gathered for this year’s Marine Advanced Technology Education Center’s International Student ROV (remotely-operated vehicle) Competition. 650 Students from five different countries came together- including the U.S., Canada, China (Hong Kong), Scotland and Russia to compete. For the competition the students were require to design and build robots that would measure the temperature of an underwater vent (made out of PVC pipe) as well as capture “crabs” and collect “lava samples.” Students also presented posters and reports they had made to volunteer judges, who were made up of professional technologists and engineers in marine-related industries. Students compete in two classes, Explorer and Ranger (Explorer class ROVs operate at higher power levels).
The Competition is designed to present students with the types of challenges faced by scientists and engineers working in extreme ocean environments. The tasks students were asked to complete are designed to be similar to tasks scientists and engineers complete when exploring hydrothermal vents. The hydrothermal vents are hot springs located deep on the seafloor near mid-ocean ridges, where the earth’s tectonic plates slowly spread apart to create new seafloor crust. Vents emit continuous streams of super-heated, mineral-rich water through cracks in the earth’s crust, creating an ecosystem that supports unique communities.
The MATE ROV competition teaches students about science, technology, engineering, math, and critical thinking skills. They also help students become aware of technical careers in which they can apply these skills. It is a critical step in addressing the shortage of qualified engineers and technical professionals.
For the complete list of ROV competition winners and award prizes, please visit: http://www.marinetech.org/rov_competition/2008/final_standings.php.
Filed under Education | Tags: k-12, MATE ROV competition
Eureka! Cartoons Reach K-12 Students with Engineering Concepts
Posted by Sheri on July 15th, 2008 | 1 Comment »
The idea to teach science and engineering ideas through cartoons is not new to K-12 teachers (Donald Duck in Mathmagic Land is probably the best example). The Eureka video series is another instance that may have gotten lost over time. Cartoons cater to different learning modalities than typical classroom instruction but some cartoons are better then others. Eureka captures viewers’ attention with its’ absent minded characters who demonstrate physics concepts (mechanics) along to a clear and concise narration of the key concepts.
What is especially cool about the Eureka series is that the concert concepts aren’t lost in the silly animation (but, nevertheless, the animation is very silly).
Filed under Education | Tags: Education, k-12
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