By Tom Henderson
Small Times Senior Writer

ANN ARBOR, Mich., June 29, 2001 — As 24 public school teachers walked away from their tour of the University of Michigan’s clean rooms and MEMS laboratories, the buzz was loud and clear.

“This will be revolutionary,” said Peter Elias, a physical science teacher at Clague Middle School in Ann Arbor. “We’re getting the big picture. How this can affect everybody.”

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High school students, from left, Gaurav Bhatnagar, Elaine Ni and Brandon Gregory stand next to a LEGO MEMS tower they built that measures the force of gravity. Small Times photo by Tom Henderson.

“We’re talking about people who have never heard before, hearing. People who have never seen, seeing. Paraplegics who will walk again,” said Al Tessmer, who teaches physical science and technology at Tappan Middle School in Ann Arbor.

“There are incredible things ahead of us,” he said. “When I read three years ago that some researcher was predicting a 150-year lifespan, I didn’t believe it. Now, I do.”

The University of Michigan and its partners in an Engineering Research Center in wireless integrated microsystems (WIMS), sponsored by the National Science Foundation, wanted to get public school science teachers excited about teaching small technology. And excitement was what they got at a two-day conference this week.

“I didn’t know anything about what they were doing in WIMS,” said Shawn Oppliger, who came 600 miles from the distant Keweenaw Peninsula in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula with a contingent of seven teachers and administrators.

“As I told my husband last night, this is like science fiction. I taught chemistry and physics, so this doesn’t fly over my head. But, still, it’s amazing what they’re capable of doing.”

MAKING TECHNOLOGY FUN

Funding for the nearly year-old ERC includes a mandate for outreach in small tech to grade schools, middle schools and high schools. The program is overseen by a coalition of U-M, Michigan State University and Michigan Technological University.

A pilot program was started at Okemos High School, near MSU. The two-day seminar at U-M was designed to expand that pilot into Ann Arbor and Detroit schools and into a coalition of small districts from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

Tuesday, a series of researchers brought the teachers up to date on WIMS and the potential capabilities of devices they are working on. That’s where Tessmer and the others heard about cochlear implants to bring sound to the deaf, and other proposed wireless devices to help overcome spinal-cord injury and blindness.

They were also introduced to the kinds of MEMS-controlled robots made of LEGO blocks that are available to make learning about the technology fun for grade school and middle school students.

Wednesday, the teachers toured the U-M labs, peeked through the windows at the clean rooms and learned about fabrication techniques for growing silicon wafers.

They also heard reports from three high school students at Okemos who had participated in the pilot WIMS program.

Last school year, Okemos seniors Gaurav Bhatnagar and Brandon Gregory and junior Elaine Ni met regularly in the MSU MEMS labs with two college engineering students, Pedro Barba and Nathan Usher, who advised them as they built a series of devices using LEGO MINDSTORMS kits, educational tools that allow students to build programmable robots and devices out of LEGO blocks, microcontrollers and wiring.

The students demonstrated how, using light sensors at the top and bottom of a LEGO tower, they were able to measure the acceleration of a falling object because of the force of gravity.

Both Bhatnagar and Gregory had already decided to enroll in the U-M engineering school before joining the pilot program, but Gregory said the pilot program changed his planned major. “I thought maybe I’d major in aeronautical engineering but I got into this and found out that programming microchips was a lot more interesting than I thought it was. Now I’m going into electrical engineering.”

Ni has one more year of high school left. “I wasn’t sure what I wanted to study in college, but now I’m thinking about electrical engineering,” said Ni.

TAKING IT TO THE CLASSROOM

Late in the session Wednesday, the teachers from each district huddled with their counterparts and came up with a wish list of activities they hoped to involve their students in next year.

Margaret Tucker, speaking for the Detroit contingent, said the teachers hoped to have some LEGO MINDSTORMS kits, which cost about $260 each, available for grade school and middle school kids, and that senior high students would be introduced to microcontrollers, which require some computer programming to operate.

Oppliger’s contingent had a bigger plan. She is director of an Upper Peninsula center for science and mathematics, which coordinates and funds activities for many neighboring schools and districts. Oppliger said the center would buy enough LEGO MINDSTORMS for nine groups of students at area elementary and middle schools.

She said she wanted to procure silicon wafers to bring into science classrooms, as well as wireless probes and sensors for experiments in chemistry and physics classes.

“We’re really in our infant stage and we’re learning a lot,” she said. “When we come back next year, hopefully we’ll have more to report.”

“The evolution-versus-revolution process is important to us,” said Ann Arbor spokesman Jack Custer. The district needs to move slowly because it has Macintosh computers and the microcontrollers that control a lot of the WIMS and MEMS devices work more readily with PCs, Custer said.

“We want to go slowly and work out the bugs,” he said.

The Okemos teachers, with more small tech experience, had the most ambitious list. According to Dave Chapman, area coordinator for the high school science department, that list includes:

• Having high school kids take the LEGO robots into elementary schools to get the younger kids excited;
• Developing short video segments that explain the technology;

• Integrating MEMS into other curricula, such as biology, chemistry and physics;
• Getting small tech components, such as large silicon wafers, to offer students hands-on experience;
• Encouraging students to visit the MSU labs;
• Exhibiting MEMS material at teacher conventions and gatherings to help spread the word.

ANOTHER PROGRAM IN ILLINOIS

A researcher at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is creating a short course in small tech aimed at high school students and hopes to have a video series available for distribution and a Web site launched early next year.

Taher Saif, an assistant professor in mechanical engineering, received a three-year, $250,000 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) in mid-1998. Most of the money was to support his research in thin films for small tech devices, but $40,000 was to develop instruction materials in MEMS. Saif said he got the university to add $10,000 to the teaching project.

Saif said the video series will include eight to 10 segments showing how MEMS are made, where they are used, potential benefits and why they are so small. Each segment will be five to seven minutes long.

“It will hopefully give the kids enough exciting content to get some of them interested in becoming engineers and give all of them a broad-based understanding of the technology,” said Saif.

Three of the video segments are done and being reviewed by NSF, he said. Saif said the videos will be available for a nominal cost, but the price has not been established.

A second component of the curriculum will be a collection of MEMS devices for students to look at under microscopes, in conjunction with simple experiments, such as showing them how tiny cantilever beams of varying length vibrate as a microphone placed in front of them makes sounds in a variety of frequencies.

Those devices, and that component, will only be available to high schools willing to make a field trip to the Illinois campus.

The third component will be the Web site. Saif said he hopes to have NSF approval of its contents and the site launched early next year. He said teachers will be able to download the video segments on MEMS, access texts and reports on small tech and see film clips of experiments he is collecting from a variety of sources, including national laboratories and private companies.

The Web site does not yet have an address.

MINORITY STUDENT PROGRAM

The ERC also is sponsoring an intensive four-week WIMS/MEMS program for Detroit-area minority students this summer on the MSU campus, beginning July 1.

The seminar is in conjunction with a 24-year-old program called the Detroit Area Pre-College Engineering Program (DAPCEP). DAPCEP brings in eighth- and ninth-grade minority students for a series of four one-week introductory engineering seminars each summer. Margaret Tucker is an administrator with the program.

This year, the ERC is paying the cost of an expanded program for senior high students, continuing a pilot program begun last year without ERC funding.

Students attend lectures by MEMS researchers, visit computer and MEMS labs and are taught technical writing, web design, engineering design, Microsoft Office, Visual Basic and how to research on the Internet.

The University of Illinois at Chicago earlier this month brought in 20 10th-grade students and six teachers from Illinois public schools for a one-week introduction to MEMS-based bioengineering.

The teachers were given lab projects they could use during the next school year, said Richard Magin, head of UIC’s bioengineering department.

“When kids are born, their parents want them to do two things: eat and play,” said Dean Aslam, the MSU professor who heads up that school’s ERC involvement. “Then when they turn five, suddenly they say, ‘Don’t play, learn.’ No wonder kids get confused.

“We want to get students to think learning is play. We just give them high-tech toys to play with.”

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CONTACT THE AUTHOR:
Tom Henderson at [email protected] or call 734-994-1106, ext. 233.