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Camp piques students’ interest
in engineering as career
Kathryn Belling, left, and Madeline Dennehy work on their section of the camp’s robotics project: a Rube Goldberg contraption powered entirely by radiant energy using small solar panels. Photo: TRÉSOR MAVINGA
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UB-Niagara Grid leadership camp sparks students’ interest in engineering. Watch a video.
Erin Todaro’s first attempt at a miniature scale wind turbine didn’t work out as she expected. The foam blades barely turned at all when hit with wind. Her second attempt, however, was much more successful. This time, Todaro used balsa wood and changed the shape of the blades.
“I wanted to try something new. I tried increasing the surface area of the blades by using more of a trapezoid shape with rounded edges,” explained the soon-to-be Clarence High School junior. With those modifications, Todaro’s turbine generated the most power of any in her group.
Todaro was one of 60 exceptional high school students from Buffalo and its surrounding suburbs who participated in a four-day residential summer camp hosted by the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, in partnership with National Grid, which funded the program.
The National Grid/UB Engineering Summer Camp began July 30 and ended Aug. 2 with a series of presentations by the students, many of whom had a proud parent in attendance in Agrusa Auditorium in Barbara and Jack Davis Hall. This was the first time UB Engineering has offered a residential summer camp.
National Grid has had a partnership with UB Engineering for several years, and both parties saw the summer camp as a way to expose high school students to real-world applications in engineering, according to Dennis Elsenbeck, ME ’96, regional executive for National Grid, which is providing $200,000 over four years for the camp.
Another goal of the camp was to draw students’ attention to the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics—commonly known as STEM—fields that studies show students lose interest in by the time they enter middle school.
“We started this camp to motivate high school students to think about engineering as a career and to expose them to the many possibilities at this university,” said Marilyn Helenbrook, executive director of Buffalo-area Engineering Awareness for Minorities (BEAM), a UB Engineering-based program that conducts pre-collegiate summer programs at colleges around the area.
“Many of them said the camp changed their outlook on engineering as a profession and the university as a whole,” Helenbrook added.
That included Hannah Hamilton, who will be a sophomore at Sweet Home High School. “Before this, I wasn’t too sure about engineering. I’m glad I did this. We did a lot more than I expected, and it was more free form, so you could work on whatever you wanted,” Hamilton said.
Students like Hamilton were nominated for the summer camp by their high school administrators, based on their academic average.
The sophomores-to-be worked in teams to create a 30-foot-long Rube Goldberg contraption powered entirely by radiant energy, using small solar panels. They accomplished this feat over the course of just eight hours of work. The project progressed from concepts written on a board to a series of mechanical devices created using Lego Mindstorms robotics kits. Students demonstrated their final product for their parents on the last day of the camp. Each group’s device employed radiant energy to move a ball through the chain of robotics.
Incoming juniors like Todaro built mini wind turbines using KidWind kits, which they also demonstrated.
In addition to plenty of hands-on work, the camp featured classroom sessions and guest speakers, tours of a variety of UB labs, evening entertainment and tours of National Grid’s Dewey Avenue station, UB’s North Campus—including the Solar Strand—and UB’s Downtown Campus.
At the conclusion of last Thursday’s presentations, Rajan Batta, acting dean of the engineering school, presented each student with a $1,000 scholarship on behalf of the school should they choose to enroll in UB’s engineering program upon their graduation from high school.
Afterward, they were treated to lunch in Barbara and Jack Davis Hall, named after the couple in recognition of their philanthropic contributions to UB. Jack Davis, a 1955 UB engineering graduate, was a keynote speaker at the luncheon.
Program leaders said the students who participated are exactly the kind the engineering school would like to enroll.
“I can’t remember when I’ve been with a more outstanding group of young people,” said Niels Andersen, Saturday programs teacher for BEAM.
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