By Tom Henderson
Small Times Senior Writer
EAST LANSING, Mich., July 31, 2001 — Officials at Michigan State University (MSU) think their small tech lessons to high school students during summer vacation may help solve a shortage of American-born engineers and researchers.
Stan Williams, chief of Hewlett-Packard’s nanotechnology laboratory, recently
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| From left, Loren Hickman, Russell Covington Jr., Meghan Brown and Thomas Guillory III built a device that uses a light sensor to sort LEGO pieces by color. |
While Williams made his comments earlier this month about the talent crisis in high tech to congressional Democrats, MSU was trying to do something about it — hosting 26 minority high school students from the Detroit area in an intensive, four-week residential program aimed at convincing them to become engineers.
The Academic Intensive Summer Residential Program was organized by the Diversity Programs Office of MSU’s engineering department and affiliated with the Detroit Area Pre-College Engineering Program (DAPCEP), which was founded in 1977 to provide educational opportunities for minority students.
The residential program, in its second year, was sponsored in part by the National Science Foundation’s Center for Wireless Integrated Microsystems (WIMS), which includes Michigan State, Michigan Technological University in Houghton and the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
It concluded with a series of demonstrations for parents and administrators Saturday of student-designed WIMS and Web-design projects.
“I had always wanted to be an architectural engineer, but now I’m thinking of becoming an electrical engineer,” said George Bibbs of Farmington Hills, a suburb of Detroit, who will be a senior. “I had never heard of WIMS before this, but it’s going to be such a big part of everything.”
Bibbs’ four-person team had used a LEGO MINDSTORMS robotics kit to design and build an insect, about 10 inches in length, that was activated by an air-flow sensor and changed direction when touch sensors in its legs came into contact with a wall or object.
The students learned the C++ programming language and programmed the robot’s microcontroller. They learned Web design and a 3D engineering design software called Unigraphics. They were also taught technical writing and how to put together a Power Point presentation.
All the students were from the Detroit area, with 17 of them from the Detroit Public Schools, had at least a B average and are about to enter either the 11th or 12th grades.
MSU was also part of a related program last week aimed at would-be engineers going into the ninth and 10th grades. Called the One By Four Program, 15 Detroit area students spent a week at a time taking courses at each of four universities — Lawrence Technological University in suburban Southfield, the University of Detroit-Mercy and Wayne State University, both in Detroit, and MSU.
The MSU portion, which coincided with the final week of the senior-high program, focused on WIMS. One group of three students, in just four days, designed a LEGO car that used a light-sensor to track a black line.
The MSU offerings may expand next year to include a summer program for elementary students, one for girls only to encourage more women engineers, and one for Lansing students modeled on the DAPCEP program.
“I get sensitive when I hear professors say Detroit area schools aren’t supposed to be very good,” said Drew Kim, assistant director of the Diversity Programs Office and the students’ guide/mentor/principal for a month. “It’s not that Detroit students underachieve, they are underrepresented. You give those kids the opportunities, they can be as good as anybody. If you give them the tools to succeed, they will.”
The students must earn every bit of opportunity the course offers.
Kim warned them at orientation that they were in for a tough four weeks. They had long hours and unbending discipline — no caps, no tank tops, lights on at 6:30 a.m. and out at 11:30 p.m., and a school day that lasted from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. and included three hours of math a day. The students often worked on their projects until 10:30 p.m.
“The saving grace was meals,” Kim said. “We work on their attitude. We tear them down and build them up, and in four weeks that’s a big job. After the first week, half of them were thinking about dropping out. But I tell them at orientation, if you can make it through our program, you’re ready for anything.
“One of the things we’re really into is stressing that we feel we’re responsible for them going into engineering. And that we know what it takes to be an engineer,” Kim said.
“We weren’t used to that kind of course load,” said Meghan Brown, who will be a senior at North Farmington High this fall. Brown did so well in the program that at its conclusion, she was one of two students offered a partial scholarship at MSU, beginning in the fall of 2002. The other was Jason Sinclair, who will be a senior at the Advanced Technology Academy in Southfield.
“You got used to the work load over time,” said Bibbs.
Last Friday was a day of rehearsals in the Holden Hall residential dormitory they shared with high school football players attending an athletic camp. Each DAPCEP student had been part of a small group project in each of three areas — WIMS, Unigraphics and Web design — and the best would get to show their stuff Saturday.
Three four-student WIMS projects had made the cut — Bibbs’ air-pressure insect, a LEGO device that automatically sorted pieces by color and a device that gave readouts of the ambient temperature. Each group of students took turns took turns in front of their peers, making a Power Point presentation accompanied by a demonstration of the individual MINDSTORMS projects.
Each group then listened to critiques from students and mentors, who included MSU graduate students and two of last year’s outstanding DAPCEP scholars, Kaylan Maye of Inkster, who starts a computer engineering program at MSU this falls, and Eric Benton, who will be a senior at Detroit’s Cass Technical High School.
Afterwards, Kim got a pleasant surprise. “As much as they have complained about the tough schedules, at least half of them said they are now interested in being a student mentor for the next year’s program,” said Kim.
“What’s even more interesting is that many of these students who want to be a student mentor are the very same people who wanted to go home after the first week. We started with 26 students and graduated 26 students.”
RELATED STORY: U.S. alarmed by shortage of students interested in science and engineering
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CONTACT THE AUTHOR:
Tom Henderson at [email protected] or call 734-528-6292.