Published December 6, 2016
At a glance
- Program brings a diverse set of middle school students to receive mentoring from engineering undergraduates.
- The program uses robotics to teach STEM and engineering design concepts.
- The final two weeks involve a challenging capstone project.
TAMPA, FL – An engineering mentoring program at the University
of South Florida (USF) is bringing real-world problem-solving skills to
youngsters in the Tampa Bay community. The Bulls Engineering Youth
Experience (Bulls-EYE) program is “like Big Brothers Big Sisters meets
STEM,” said Instructor Jonathan Gaines.
Gaines, a faculty member in the mechanical engineering
department at USF, started the program two years ago as a way to
bring STEM learning to students who might have limited access to it.
Mailers advertising the five-week summer program are sent to middle
school students living within a 10- to 15-mile radius of the university.
“We really get a mix of all types of different kids,” said Gaines. “We
get kids that haven’t ever heard of engineering before or don’t have
any experience with engineering all the way to kids that are children
of faculty at USF. That’s, I think, one of the powerful things about our
program is that we put all these kids into the same program.”
Fifteen undergraduate students are hired as mentors, and they go
into the program almost as fresh as the students they’re mentoring.
Although most come from USF’s College of Engineering, none of them
are trained in the specifics of the challenges the teams will face. “We
don’t want the undergraduate students instructing the kids on how to
build a robot,” said Gaines. “So we have the undergraduate students
coming in, you might say blind, into the projects.” Each mentor is
grouped with two middle schoolers, forming a team of sorts.
The program teaches STEM and the engineering design process
through the use of robotics. In 2015, Gaines used LEGO® MINDSTORMS®.
This year, he wanted to bring more of a real-world robotics experience.
“We really wanted to give them an experience with robotics that was
more realistic, like real robotics work that you might do. And also
just an easy platform for these middle school kids to do some pretty
advanced things with the robotics.” Gaines said he “saw how awesome
the TETRIX® PRIME®” system was and ended up purchasing 10 starter kits
for the students to use.
PLAN, ACT, EVALUATE
The engineering design process can be wordy and complicated
for middle schoolers, so Gaines simplified it into three steps: Plan, Act,
Evaluate. “It’s a three-step design process, and it’s simple,” he explained.
“First thing the students have to do every time they do a project is plan
what they want to do. They have to produce sketches; they have to think
through the constraints.” After they have their plan down, they have
to build their robot, test it, and then evaluate it and possibly redesign
it based on the results. Along the way, students learn about design,
hardware, software, and life skills such as teamwork and planning.
FINDING REAL-WORLD SOLUTIONS
The culmination of the five weeks is a capstone project that usually
encompasses the final two weeks. This year students were tasked with building robotic boats using National Instruments myRIO for control, the
TETRIX PRIME system for propulsion, and recyclable materials for flotation.
TETRIX PRIME, said Gaines, was a perfect fit for the project. “[It’s] a
really awesome system because [the students] were able to just pick it
up. Just from doing the ground robots, they were able to pick up really
all they needed to build the propulsion system for the boats.”
The inherent weight of the TETRIX parts also proved to be a plus.
“One thing that ended up being great,” said Gaines, “was that the
weight provided a real-world constraint on how to build these boats. They had to be really clever about how many parts they used. And so
it ended up fitting directly with the lessons we were teaching them.
We really preached to them, ‘This TETRIX PRIME system is heavy; you’re
going to have to think through how to do these compound gear trains
with as little weight as possible.’ It really is realistic and that’s, I think,
one of the main benefits to using the TETRIX PRIME system is that it
really did give our kids exposure to more realistic constraints.”
IDEAS THAT FLOAT
Gaines admits the boats were not exactly a walk in the park. “This was
not an easy project by any means,” he said. “We really emphasized that
this was a problem that even I hadn’t solved before I gave it to them.
I didn’t know the best configuration for getting the best performance.”
And so, beyond certain constraints, students and their mentors were
on their own. They had free rein on the design of their boats, which meant
10 boats with varying designs – including one that had a four-stage
compound gear train – all ended up working in the water. “That’s the
nature of working with young kids,” said Gaines. “Their ideas are just really
amazing. I was really proud of all 10 of the boats that were built.”
Learn more about the program:
You can check out the Bulls-EYE boats – and learn more
about the program – by visiting the Bulls-EYE Facebook page.