Departments
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Week of 23 April 1999 |
Vol. II, No. 32 |
Feature
Article
ENG mentors retool local teens
By David J. Craig
For 15-year-old Christelle Celestin, dismantling and reassembling household appliances is a form of amusement that never grows old. "Last month a tape got stuck in my VCR, so I took the whole thing apart, took the tape out, and put it back together," says Celestin, a sophomore at John D. O'Bryant School of Mathematics and Science in Roxbury, a public exam school. "And it worked. I've been doing stuff like that for a long time."
Until recently, such tinkering was mainly a way for Celestin to flabbergast her family and satisfy her curiosity about how mechanical devices work. But now she realizes that her technical deftness may be the first step toward a career in the sciences. Celestin was one of 16 high school students participating in BU's High School Robotics Challenge, where they build small, insect-like robots under the eye of College of Engineering students in a Boston University laboratory.
The goal of the Robotics Challenge, which was initiated by ENG students and funded with a $1,200 Diversity Grant from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), is to give minority and female youngsters the sort of hands-on experience often impossible in high school classrooms.
The high school students, who were recruited by the Massachusetts Pre-Engineering Program (Mass PEP), a nonprofit Boston group that encourages minority students to pursue careers in science and mathematics, came to BU from several greater Boston high schools for four consecutive Saturdays in March and April.
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In an effort to coordinate the movement of a robot's legs, electrical engineering major Tunde Ashafa (ENG'00) (right) helps Phung Vo, a freshman at the John D. O'Bryant School of Mathematics and Science in Roxbury. Photo by Albert L'Etoile |
"In the first week, a lot of them weren't too confident," says Tunde Ashafa (ENG'00), a native of Nigeria, who is one of about a dozen ENG students who served as mentors for the high school students. "We just isolated things step by step and showed them that a lot of this stuff is simple. There's a difference in their attitude now."
The Robotics Challenge is the brainchild of Carlos Romero (ENG'00), a vice president of MES. Romero learned from personal experience, he says, that it is important to encourage students to study science when they are young.
"Engineering is a very specific area of study, so you need to become aware of a specific academic track," explains Romero, who participated in similar Mass PEP programs in high school. "When I came to college, a lot of my black and Hispanic friends were interested, but they felt they were too far behind. The Mass PEP programs taught me the focus I needed to become a professional -- when I graduated from high school I had calculus and three years of physics under my belt. The first step is showing these kids that engineering isn't a big intimidating thing, and that minorities and women can be successful. That's what we're trying to do."
Celestin admits she found the project "confusing at first," but says she was surprised at how quickly she picked it up. "Now, it's interesting," she says. She wants to study aeronautics in college.
Phung Vo, a freshman at O'Bryant, says he won't soon forget the frustration of trying to coordinate the movement of his robot's legs. "The legs are supposed to move between 150 and 120 degrees from the center, but mine were so crooked on one side they were bumping into the body," says Vo, who wants to study electrical engineering and astronomy in college. "The problem was the connection between the legs and the motor. I took it apart and compared it to one that was working. I just had to straighten the connection. I won't make the same mistake twice."
Assistant Professor of Engineering Morton Isaacson says that programs such as the Robotics Challenge are an important way to maintain the numbers of minorities and women in ENG. "Our challenge is always to find students with good potential," he says. "That's where programs like these come in." When he was a student at Rochester University during the 1960s, he says, engineering classes were strictly male and white.
Of the 1,171 undergraduates enrolled in ENG last fall, 26 percent were female and 31 percent were minorities. In the fall of 1993, just 20 percent of undergraduates were female and 29 percent were minorities.
Loretta Hawkes (ENG'99), who wrote the grant application for the Robotics Challenge, says that student diversity in a collegiate science program is important in ways that may not be obvious. "Engineering is about solving problems," she says, "and the more backgrounds and perspectives you have in a classroom, the better your chances of solving a problem."
Romero's sights are already set on next year. "I want to do this again," he says. "When I was in high school, being an Hispanic engineer was just a dream, and the idea of building a robot under the guidance of mechanical engineers was totally unbelievable. I hope we've showed some of these kids that it can be reality."