Arduino Inventions and Robotics Club president Ariel Stutzman works on a pair of LiDAR goggles for the blind as part of a project the club presented at a science fair at the NASA Ames Research Facility. Photo by Mary York
Some clubs bake cookies. Some clubs watch movies. Others build robotic hands controlled by brainwaves.
Last fall eager students tore open packages in the MESA Center from NASA Ames. Filled with arduino’s – microcontroller-based kits for building digital devices that can sense and control the physical world – the boxes were given to 13 members of the Arduino Inventions and Robotics (AIR) Club who were challenged to use them to engineer and program innovative inventions.
AIR Vice President Yousra Yassein, who said her life ambition is to work for NASA, recalled her excitement.
“It was a little like Christmas morning,” she said. “We got this from NASA, NASA sent this to us. It was really exciting.”
The program, headed by the California Space Grant Consortium (CaSGC), was created in response to universities like UCSD lamenting the fact that many of the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) transfer students are not properly prepared for higher level projects. Its goal was to provide students with technology they might not otherwise have access to.
Professor of Mathematics Bruce Smith advises the AIR Club. He said the arduinos have provided his students an invaluable opportunity.
“This gives them a look at what real world engineering is like,” he said. “It’s one thing to sit in a physics class and draw a resistor. That’s not what they’re doing. The value in this is that they move from the abstract theory of engineering and see where the rubber meets the road.”
In September the SWC AIR Club participated in a showcase at NASA’s Ames Research Facility. Their inventions included distance sensing LiDAR goggles for the blind, a grey water filtration system and a DNA replicator.
Club president Ariel Stutzman, a self-taught computer programmer since he was 12, said he was very excited to show off his work to NASA scientists.
“This is the very first year that NASA is doing this, so I feel very lucky to be a part of this project,” he said. “I mainly worked on the Lidar goggles and I was happy with how it turned out, but the incrementally better versions of it down the road when there could be 3D mapping of entire cities, just the actual of idea of that, I couldn’t wait to show them.”
Yassein said she still had not come back to earth since the NASA trip.
“For me it’s NASA, there’s really nowhere else I’d rather work, to actually meet NASA scientists and directly present to them was mind blowing,” she said. “I made a lot of really good contacts, a lot of the employees encouraged me to apply for an internship because they are currently doing research on sonic explosions and I am a part of an internship that is also working on that.”
Yassein moved to the U.S. from Morocco when she was 14. She said the transition has been difficult at times, but opportunities to learn make her sacrifices worthwhile.
“In Africa opportunities like this are non-existent, especially for students,” she said. “People are very limited, that’s why I made the decision to leave my family and come here. My Mom is my best friend, but to this day she doesn’t fully understand (why I left). It’s just tough. I did it to excel and grow in my education.”
America’s decline in STEM education has been well documented. In the 1980s 40 percent of the world’s scientists and engineers resided in the U.S compared to 15 percent today. In 2008 four percent of U.S. Bachelor’s degrees were awarded in engineering, compared to 31 percent in China.
The Obama administration has made it a point of emphasis to create programs that help bolster our global standing in STEM fields. California’s Space Grant Consortium is an example of how smart and well-targeted government programs can have a profound impact on America’s students, said Smith.
AIR Club will continue to participate in the NASA program and is currently looking for students to participate in next semester’s presentation, said Smith.
“The goal of the club is to create opportunities for students to get exposure to science, engineering and programming,” he said. “Opportunities turn into internships, which turn into jobs. It offers so many advantages over the student who (has less experience). This creates students that can say ‘I built this and that and I presented at NASA.’ That really allows our students to rock and stand head and shoulders above the competition.”
Riding high off of the momentum from the success of the NASA projects, AIR Club is looking to take on other challenges.
Stutzman said they want to take it up a notch.
“The club definitely has a life outside of the NASA project,” he said. “I have this contact with a doctoral candidate from MIT that I met. He’s going to work with us on building an EEG shield, which measures brain waves. We’re going to use arduinos to read your brainwaves and react based on your thoughts, so you could have a robotic hand that moves if you want it to.”
Although the jargon and complicated hardware may seem intimidating, Yassein said now that they have some experience working on complicated projects they are eager to help expand the club.
“When I first started I really did not know what an arduino was,” she said. “Now I’ve made a filtration system and went to NASA. Anybody who is interested should try AIR Club. All it takes is commitment.”
