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Outreach

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Building a low-cost 3D printer and 3D printing enabled engineering design

In Summer 2016, we participated in the Research Experience for Teachers and the Raising Interest in Science and Engineering (RISE) programs. We hosted high school engineering and robotics teacher Kristina Granlund-Moyer and high school student Crystal Perez. Together, they assembled a Prusa i3 3D printer from a kit of parts and learned how to operate it and print their own designs (Kristina's poster, Crystal's poster). In addition to building the 3D printer, Kristina created an education transfer plan to take what she learned over the summer back to her high school students, and Crystal learned how to program in Python. Meanwhile, Ryan Cohen, a Stanford undergraduate student participating the the VPUE Summer Undergraduate Research Program (VPUE REU) helped with printer assembly and studied topology optimization of trusses via a genetic algorithm (Ryan's poster). At the end of the summer, Kristina and Crystal took the assembled 3D printer back to their high school -- we are excited to see what they do with it next! 

Mechanics simulation tutorial at Eastside College Preparatory School 

In 2015, we taught an interactive lesson on simulating structural materials at Eastside College Preparatory School (link), a high school located in East Palo Alto. In our lesson, we discussed how simulation is used in engineering design and worked through an example of modeling a structural system using the program MASTAN2 (link). 

Machine learning project with Eastside College Preparatory School 

In 2022, we collaborated with Eastside College Preparatory School (link) to provide a machine learning project for their Science course. In our project, we introduced the basic concept of neural networks to students and helped them finish a project about classification of electric vehicle brands.