[Editor's Note: This has (almost) nothing to do with photography. I do this from
time to
time.]
In this issue:
- A STEM Program on Steroids
- Sony's new Image Authentication System
- Grandpa's Inventions
A STEM Program on Steroids
For
the past year I’ve been volunteering at an organization called Beaver Works
Summer Institute, a nonprofit subsidiary of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It’s an extraordinary program which
challenges high school students to tackle subjects you wouldn’t expect high
school students to tackle: Learning to program a quantum computer. Building an AI-based personal assistant. Building an autonomous vehicle. Learning to hack into Internet Of Things
devices (so when they grow up and become programmers they can know how to
defend against these common techniques).
Things like that. The program
makes use of gifted expert volunteers from MIT Lincoln Laboratory to create and
teach courses that high school students can clearly understand.
The
challenge I participated in had them building a prototype CubeSat. And it was a remarkably thorough course; it
included learning to program in Python, and introduced the students to orbital
dynamics, the space environment, communications, power engineering, propulsion,
thermal management, control systems, systems engineering, CAD software, and satellite
development tools. At a HIGH SCHOOL level!! (As I said, gifted
educators!)
Then
the teams were then given about $400 in computer hardware and were told “Take
this and build a prototype CubeSat and demonstrate its effectiveness to detect
plastics in the ocean”.
You
can imagine the skills that developed while accepting that challenge: the
students had to design their own mission, create a software architecture, calculate
a power and link budget, break up the design into subsystems (and program them all) and test each
module independently before integrating them into one functional
demonstration.
Along the way they
developed the kinds of communication and problem solving skills that usually
come with project-based learning.
At the
end of the course there was a final event where teams presented
their projects, from design to video demonstrations showing their
effectiveness.
(I actually hosted that
event.
I was quite impressed at their
designs and software architectures! It's a little long but
you can watch it here. (I appear 5 times in the credits! :-))
I’ve seen first-hand what programs like this can do. When my younger brother was in high school he attended a similar summer program at Caltech centered on problem solving; that course changed the way his brain worked and he excelled in college, ending up with a Ph.D. in biology, and he spent 20+ years working at Vanderbilt University.
As
you might be able to tell, I am a fan of this program. J Shortly after the final event, I approached
the staff saying, “How else can I contribute to your program? The world needs more engineers. I can create course content for you, I can do
high school outreach, I can even do boring administrative work to allow more
students to participate in this incredible program.” 15 minutes into that meeting it became clear
that their greatest need was not for more volunteer engineers, but rather for corporate grants to allow them to scale the
program by paying their volunteers and establishing a solid infrastructure to
allow further outreach and growth.
Without making any promises, I committed to working with them to seek additional grant funding so they can grow the program. I've never done grant writing or fundraising before, but I can learn. This is a worthwhile project that deserves my support.
(Any of you have any connections to a foundation that would like to support a STEM program on steroids? :-) )
Sony's new "Anti-Forgery" Image Authentication System
