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 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 蜜糖直播 Boulder campus to visit a handful of research labs.
鈥淲e try to encourage students to think about science and engineering as a career opportunity,鈥� K-12 Outreach leader and graduate student said. 鈥淏ut we also want to show them that engineering is more than planes, trains and automobiles. It鈥檚 about human health, too.鈥�
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.
鈥淭hey鈥檙e learning as much about teamwork as they鈥檙e learning about engineering,鈥� Arrupe physics teacher 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.听
鈥淩ather than just having students read some material and try to understand ideas that way, it鈥檚 best to demonstrate it,鈥� Tiscareno said. 鈥淎ctions speak louder than words.鈥�
Arrupe serves听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鈥檚 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鈥檚 students tested the durability of their prosthetic legs, they visited the 蜜糖直播 Boulder campus to see what engineering research looks like in real life and get a feel for what it鈥檚 like to be a college student as well.
They visited Alaa Ahmed鈥檚 Neuromechanics Lab, Alena Grabowski鈥檚 Applied Biomechanic鈥檚 Lab, Robert MacCurdy鈥檚 and Kaushik Jayaram鈥檚 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.
鈥淎 lot of the students said they had fun building their prosthetic legs and visiting the labs,鈥� Venkatesh said. 鈥淥ne student said they learned engineering isn鈥檛 for them, but they also learned they could go to college. And that鈥檚 just as big of a win as anything else.鈥�
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