Team UV has officially transitioned to Engineering A Future (EAF).
Please click the following link or the above picture to redirect to our new website: Engineering A Future !
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Education
All posts tagged Education
Well, it appears that it has become time at last for Team UV to end its journey. Today marks the 345th day that TeamUV.org has been active and I can guarantee you that every one of us here at Team UV has throughly enjoyed and cherished the 29,676,840 seconds that this blog has been running (at the time of publishing this post). During this time we have had the incredible opportunity to share some of our own research and, far more importantly, help to inspire interest in the STEM fields amongst the general public with visitors from 115 countries for a total of nearly 8,300 views and well over 200 likes from 114 WordPress followers, our email followers, and many others.
This blog has far exceeded our expectations and for that we have all of our family, friends, supporters, and readers to thank. Without all of you, we would have never been able to accomplish what we have over the past year. I have been honored to lead this team and to have the chance to interact with all of you on a daily basis, all-the-while growing with my teammates and watching them progress through the challenges of the last 15+ months of our senior project. I believe that I can speak for all of us when I say that the experience of writing to all of you here at Team UV is not one that any of us will soon forget. These are the kinds of memories that stick with you.
The experience afforded to all of Team UV by sharing with you all over the past year will serve us well in the future as we push onwards and upwards in life and face new challenges, and I sincerely hope that our time here will serve all of you in the same way. From compressible flow regimes to programming Arduinos to biomedical diagnostic tests to 3D-printing makeup to insects with gear-like rear legs, we truly have covered a whole lot of incredibly diverse topics here at Team UV, but we have not even begun to scratch the surface of what the world of engineering has to offer. Part of the beauty of the world of engineering is that it truly is limitless. Boundaries to the engineering mindset do not exist and physical barriers to what engineers can do simply serve as challenges for scientists and engineers alike to accept. We hope that we have begun to shed some light on this reality and on the opportunities available within the STEM fields.
We set out hoping to reach just one person out there and help to inspire them to go on to pursue STEM-related careers or simply just to spend some time everyday thinking scientifically. I personally have heard from numerous people over the past year about how we have made a difference within their lives or the lives of their friends or families. I have also heard similar stories from my teammates, and that is the golden metric.
I am beyond proud of my team and what we have been able to accomplish and look forwards to continue to share with our readers about STEM over at our next project: EAF. For those that do not know, Engineering A Future (EAF) is a website that I originally intended to launch back in December 2012 with the goal of inspiring interest in the STEM fields amongst the general public…sound familiar? After preparing and stockpiling posts for a few short weeks, my Winter Break ended and the Winter 2012 quarter started in at Cal Poly Pomona (CPP) and my plans fell apart. I had become far too busy, did not have any help, and simply put had never done anything like EAF (or TeamUV.org) before. EAF was created with good intentions, but was not planned for properly by me, but I can assure you, that has all changed.
Flash forward three years and EngineeringAFuture.com will be relaunching on Monday (July 13th, 2015). This time the website is ready to go, as is the team. I have spent the past few months preparing EAF for its launch and am excited to cut the ribbon Monday morning. EAF will follow the same idea that TeamUV.org has, but will take it to a whole new level. EAF has been optimized with one goal in mind: to get as many people as humanly possible excited about STEM. Crazy, right? Well I believe that I have the perfect team to do it and that we are more than prepared to hit the ground running, help people to learn, learn (ourselves), and just have fun with it. Most of Team UV will be carrying over to EAF: Abraham, Ketton, and Andrew will all be bringing their massive brains, awesome outlooks, and passion for STEM-blogging and connecting with the community over to EAF. Unfortunately, Ben will not be continuing with us at EAF and so we wave a somber goodbye to a valued team member and friend. But fear not, while we may be losing a teammate, we are also introducing some awesome new features.
First is the style of posting. EAF will be posting three times a week (just like Team UV has been), but this time we will be posting on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Posts will go live at 0800 (purely so that our followers who check the site early will already have the content up to read, rather than having to wait around for two hours) and the social media (Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram) sharing of the posts will be sent out at 1000 hours (two hours later). Post categories have been almost completely revamped and the new categories will consist of:
- Blog Posts (Monday – Brian, Wednesday – other EAF members & guests)
- Techno Babble: Much like our Well Read posts; talking about interesting science/engineering being done today
- Lecture Notes: Much like our Presentation posts; mini lectures on cool science and engineering
- Open Mind: This category will be carried over; insight into the engineering mindset
- Guest Posts: This is a cool new category where people from outside EAF can submit requests to write guest posts on EAF! Read more here.
- Picture Posts (Friday): Very short descriptions (1-3 sentences on average) accompanied by cool STEM-related pictures
- EAF News: Short announcement posts whenever there is a change to EAF
On top of this, the new website is far more aesthetically pleasing, has many cool features and pages, and will hopefully mean a much more awesome experience for our readers and followers. Lastly, we have some very cool ideas in the works for some awesome new types of content that will launch later on down the road. The website is currently having its finishing touches put on with the About EAF page being finished up offline before transferring it to the site this weekend, a few member bio pages being finished up, and the graphical interface being tweaked a little bit more for Monday’s launch.
In closing, we want to thank our readers/supporters/followers for joining us along this journey and sincerely hope that all of you will continue to follow us over at EAF starting Monday! On Monday, a post redirecting our readers to EAF will be published.
Thank you for your time
Sincerely,
Brian
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Team UV Crest, representing our principal application (ISR), and our potential future applications (Mine Detection, Underwater Inspection, and Exploration).
It has been quite an adventure writing the posts for this site, I know I have learned a lot, and hopefully you have too. While this blog catered mostly to people interested in the science technology engineering and math fields I did what I could to make it accessible to all. One of the best ways to learn something new is to try and explain it, so thank you for letting me learn by explaining to you.
Hopefully most of you will continue on the Engineering A Future. I will not, my blog writing journey has reached its end here. It was fun while it lasted stay curious and stay creative, always stretch your minds to the limits!
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Ball bearings and technical drawings. Photo Credit: amanoverseas.com
Creativity is a huge part of being an innovative engineer. Thinking outside of the box it what has allowed the human race to advance their science and technology to the levels that we see today. While there are a few exceptions most of the engineering courses taken to receive the final degree focus on building a foundation of knowledge. These classes are designed to give a future engineer a solid base to develop ideas from. Creativity is a difficult thing to teach because it comes to everyone in a different way. Here are a few things that I do to help me become more creative.
The biggest thing, at least for me, is that I keep an idea notebook. It is just a small composition notebook that usually remains in my backpack, but when ever I see something that is frustrating or looks like it could be improved I jot it down. This way I have a list of problems that need solving.
Another thing for me is staying in touch with the advancements in technology by reading science blogs and sometimes the journal articles that they refer to. This keeps me learning and stretching my mind into new areas. Some of these new ideas I can tie to the list of problems that need solving and then I can start designing as system that would solve this problem.
Practicing the creative process is one of the best ways to get better at it. By seeing a problem and then attempting to design a system, either as a thought exercise or on paper, more problems come up, which in turn need solving. By going through this process, solving problems, learning new things, applying these things to existing problems, new and innovative solutions arise.
This is the method that I use to come up with new ideas and inject creativity into my work. Please feel free to comment with methods that you use. Everyone’s mind works a little differently and there are so many different ways to find inspiration.
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Photo Credit: tiesteach.org
As many of you are aware, we are in the transitioning phase of this website as we close out TeamUV.org and transition to EngineeringAFuture.com over the next two months, so this will be Andrew’s last Open Mind post here at Team UV, but not to fear, there are still two months of posts left here and the same types of articles will be carried over onto EAF (Engineering A Future), so without further ado, please enjoy the following:
Last week, I had one of the best educational experiences of my life: a whole day of teaching 6th graders about STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math)! My lovely girlfriend is a 6th grade, Math and Science teacher and was constantly asked by her students as to when I would visit her class. With the build of DORY in full swing and wrapping up my undergraduate degree, I just couldn’t make time for a visit during the school year. In the last few months, my interest in teaching has grown, especially teaching about science, technology, and engineering. I knew I would take the opportunity to speak to her kiddos the first chance I could get.
A self-balancing wing my controls team made for class.
My girlfriend and I made plans for me to visit the second to last day of their school year. Her kids and I couldn’t be more excited. I made a presentation about STEM and how it applies to our everyday lives. I appealed to their interests by highlighting: famous people and how they use technology, popular electronics and how they wouldn’t be around without STEM, and popular social apps and how they came to existence using STEM. I also showed them famous celebrity engineers such as Ashton Kutcher, Rowan Atkinson, and Michael Gambon. I then continued to show them projects I worked on in my undergrad such as an obstacle avoiding cart and DORY, as well as a live demonstration of a self-balancing wing. They had so many questions with some that showed real engineering intuition. Seeing the excitement in their eyes and the “light bulbs” turn on was a fulfilling moment for me.
Homopolar Motor. Photo Credit: yourepeat.com
At the end of my presentation, I gave them a little background on electrical motors and brought materials to help them make their first simple motor. With a couple of magnets, a battery, copper wire, and a bit of patience they all made a homopolar motor. One team even had their motor spin for 14 minutes before the wire fell off. We even had time to make paper bridges which turned into a very competitive activity!
Paper bridge. Photo Credit: tallbridgeguy.com
Although the day was filled with laughter and excitement, it didn’t come easy! Often times we (meaning my girlfriend!) would have to correct the kids when they would get too roudy or speak out of turn. By the end of the day, we were both so exhausted. I have a new appreciation for middle school teachers and am glad I had the chance to try out the position. It is one difficult career! Teaching 11 year olds may not be in my future, but teaching STEM classes could definitely be!
Until next time…
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Stressed guy. Photo Credit: lifechirocenter.com
“Things present themselves to you, and it’s how you choose to deal with them that reveals who you are. We all say a lot of things, don’t we, about who we are and how we think. But in the end it’s your actions, how you respond to circumstance that reveals your character.” – Cate Blachett
Problems are simply a part of life and are statistically unavoidable. However, just because everyone has problems does not mean we all approach them in the same way. It is your individual mindset that determines this. Two people can look at the same problem and have polar opposite outlooks. Personally, years in the higher education system have given me an engineering mindset which contains problem solving skills which I believe are the most valuable tools at my disposal because they can be applied to almost any problem in engineering and in life. To solve almost any problem you need to take the time to identify what you’re given, what you’re trying to find, and what are the steps to your solution. Easy right?
- Given: What do you have and know immediately? In engineering problems this could be dimensions, loads, boundary conditions, etc. In life, this could be deadlines, money or documents needed, people involved, geographical locations, etc. There is an unsurmountable number of problems you may have, but the given information gives your problem direction. It gives you a base line, where you start and what you have to start with. Sometimes what you know immediately might not be enough and you may need to research and learn new things in order to have the information needed to solve a problem.
- Find: What are you looking for, or in other words, what is your problem exactly? In engineering your problem could be looking for an oil temperature, a maximum stress a component will experience, the amount of heat flux to the system, etc. In life pinpointing exactly what you are looking for can be harder than it seems. Say your twelve year old son is sneaking out of school regularly to consume drugs with his friends at a nearby park. As a parent you might think the friends are the obvious problem and are the cause of this behavior. Or even the school is at fault because they are unable to keep kids from sneaking out of campus. However, the problem could be that your divorce with his mother and the nightly malicious arguments he hears leads him to lose stability in his life which he copes with drugs use. Hopefully it is not as melodramatic as the hypothetical, but the point is that the problem may or may not seem so clear cut and simple.
- Solution: How are you going to find a solution? Often times diving immediately into solutions can be disastrous so this step requires planning. This is where you use all your information from your previous two steps to come up with a systematic approach to a solution. Ideally you want a step-by-step approach that follows a logical progression that guides you to your answer that makes sense. However, sometimes exact solutions do not exist, assumptions need to be made to simplify the problem and make it solvable. Whatever assumptions you make, you need to be able to back them up with some sort of justification because bad assumptions can affect the quality of your final solution. Ask any student, sometimes finding the solution can make you stressed, lose your appetite, lose sleep, and even cause you to lose contact with friends and family but that is what it costs sometimes to find your answer.
This is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of how the engineering mindset can solve almost any problem. It is truly a universal tool that can be applied almost anywhere. As a young man about to enter the ‘real’ world in just a few months, I can confidently say I am ready for anything thanks to the mindset I have acquired.
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Team UV’s trip so far. Map created with: mapcustomizer.com
Today Team UV will be skipping our usual Presentation post as we are out of state in Washington for the 2015 National Conference on Undergraduate Research, where we will be presenting some of our research that we have conducted thus far in the work on our project. We have traveled some 1,500 miles from California to Nevada to Idaho to Oregon to finally Washington while transporting our propulsion system demonstrator SHEILA-D (Submerged Hydrodynamically propelled Explorer, Implementation: Los Angeles – Demonstrator) and our vehicle DORY (Dynamic Observational Reconnaissance through biomimicrY), and are excited to be presenting our research later today.
NCUR 2015 banner. Photo Credit: EWU.edu
More info to come later in the week. Until next time!
Team UV
