Looking back I'm very happy with the way the tour turned out. I think the Ypsi high students did a great job of listening and striving to understanding things. It was always a challenge for the graduate students in each lab to cut down on the scientific jargon and describe things in an accessible way to our high school students. A number of times I jumped in asking the graduate student to define terms like center of gravity, camshaft, and leaf spring. It was a real charge for me every time the Ypsi students expressed further interest in an area. One student, who often checks out in Mr. Tuttle's class, after inspecting a prothetic foot asked an insightful question related to designing the foot with more flexibility. Another student got excited by some of the demonstrations in a lab, wanted to know what sort engineering this was called and what all kinds of things in the lab did. A different student said, while we were walking between labs, that he wanted to be a biomedical engineer. This was great to hear, since he had never heard of biomedical engineering until I described my job at Medtronic in front of Mr. Tuttle's class a few months ago.
During the tour I saw some areas for improvement for future tours. We went from 2pm to 5:30pm, which was about an hour too long. We didn't really have a choice about this since the buses could only pick us up and drop us off during this time frame, but the students were understandably dragging their feet at the end. (We did have a snack break in the middle of the tour and this probably helped a lot though.) Some labs probably could have used more than 15 minutes to demonstrate things and get the students involved in a short activity. I was trying to impose as little as possible on each graduate student's time, but some of them were more than willing to create interactive demos if they were given more time. In total, we visited 7 different labs. I was trying to keep things moving in case a lab wasn't all that exciting, but I think I underestimated their attention span and it might have been better to visit 4 labs for 30 minutes each instead.
Once again, it was a good experience for everybody, and I certainly hope to find the time to plan another tour next semester.
1 comment:
Ben,
I thought the students learned a great deal during the lab tours. Many students had a favorite lab and were eager to talk about what they had seen and experienced. I am glad that several of the students are talking about going into some of the fields covered in the lab tour.
I agree we need to refine the logistics, but overall it was a very worthwhle use of time. Good Job organizing it!!!
Carol Cramer
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