Outreach and Educational Summary

K-12 Programs

BU Use of Mobile Studio 1-10-2011

Using REd BoardWe use Mobile Studio and the Red board for engaging students as part of K-12 outreach, STEM activities, and the freshman year. This use spans multiple courses, instructors, and serves a variety of goals. The boards were used specifically as described below:

“Smart Lighting: An Engineering Course” – part of the Boston University Summer Challenge program that attracts students internationally from the 10th—12th grades.  This course will be offered for the third consecutive year in the summer of 2012 and is comprised of three two-week sessions. Students gain exposure to LED devices, circuits, and optics and exploit Mobile Studio as the primary tool for experimentation. The course attracts approximately 60 students per year. Perhaps as important, the course is taught with the intention of providing teaching experience to undergraduate and graduate students from the Smart Lighting ERC and how has six eligible instructors prepared to teach the course in future iterations.  No assumptions are made about the math, science, or engineering preparation of the students in this course.

Summer Challenge (2009, 2010, 2011):

High School ParticipantsTwo-week Mobile Studio class and lab, culminating in an optical link over LEDs.  Summer Challenge offeres three two-week sessions for high school students through our Summer Challenge high school program.  Each is limited to twenty students.  These are taught by BU ERC faculty, postdoctoral researchers, graduate students and undergraduates. Summer Challenge attendees are national and international students that tend to be high-achievers who are seeking early college exposure.  There are three sessions scheduled again for summer 2012. We have designed the course, not only for outreach, but as a vehicle to ‘teach the teachers’ – exposing pedagogy to future educators through involvement of research assistants and postdoctoral investigators.   Participants to date include:

  • 2009: Instructors: Little (F), Altug (F), Carruthers (F) Assistants: Rich (UG)
  • 2010: Instructors: Little (F), Borogovac (PA), Rahaim (G), Chau (G), Huang (G) Assistants: Hongsmatip (UG), Reddington (G)
  • 2011: Instructors: Little (F), Borogovac (PA), Monroe (G)Assistants: Mirvakili (G), Hongsmatip (UG), Reddington (G)

NanoCamp: Hatice Altug leads 15 students in the summer  NanoCamp for low income urban area high school students.

NSF RET: Hatice Altug hosts one high school physics teacher and one middle school science teacher through the NSF RET program .

NSF REU: Hatice Altug hosts 5 undergraduates through the NSF REU program.

Fenway-BU Partnership:  George Pappayannis, a HS chemistry teacher at Fenway HS (part of the Boston Public Schools) brings six students to the Smart Lighting Undergraduate Research  Lab in the  spring, on a series of late Wednesday afternoons.  We are working through the lab sections of the Summer Challenge with the students.

STEM Days:  We have a Massachusetts STEM Pipeline funded summer green energy workshop last summer.  The participating middle school teachers bring their students to BU for activities on STEM Days.  The will be a session in April and one in May.  Professor Little will present his “cardboard box/CD spectrometer” activity that they then use to identify different lighting technology by their spectra.