While I fully expected my time at the ASSIST Center as part of my Kenan Fellowship to be challenging, I was not fully ready for what I experienced! This week’s post will discuss some of the challenges I faced along the way as well as the success I ultimately encountered during my time at North Carolina State University.
Perhaps the biggest challenge for me was comprehending the amount of information we received at a breakneck pace throughout the internship. I am still amazed by the breadth of information provided to us in a five week timespan. The majority of the knowledge gained relates more directly to a science curriculum and some of it went clear over my head. As a result, this pushed me even harder to think about connections between areas I do not teach and how I can incorporate the same techniques and information in my classroom.
A second challenge for me was being able to create the two lessons and a demonstration that the ASSIST Center required of us based on their provided criteria and within the time he had available at the internship. The criteria for these products covered three different areas, all of which are related to the creation of wearable devices.
The first product involved writing a lesson on One Health and relating it to my curriculum. This was initially a difficult thing for me to wrap my brain around because I teach digital arts, not engineering. However, once I started to think a bit about the possible connections to my curriculum, I found success in the knowledge that for my classes, the connections involve making sense of the data one can collect from a variety of sensors. I also decided that this would be the best and most useful lesson for other teachers around the state as it could relate to science, math and CTE alike. So, this requirement pointed me in the direction of my product for the Kenan Program as well and gave me my first product draft which was due to Kenan on the same day my internship reached its conclusion!
The second lesson we created needed to relate to the engineering design process. Now, this is right up the alley for a CTE teacher with certification in Technology Education! And, although I do not teach engineering, the same process is used throughout my curriculum, even though it is not identified as the engineering design process. But, because I chose to focus on the One Health lesson for so long, when we began discussing our progress with the other RETs, I didn’t have anything in place. Then Hannah, one of the RETs responsible for creation of the One Health Challenge, stated nobody had done anything on programming instruction. I knew right away this was my area and jumped right on it. I have to say, this is the lesson I am most proud of and it received praise from the others in the internship. This success may not be in my Kenan product, but I plan on using it to teach basic programming logic to my Advanced Game Design students this year as I always find they get easily distracted of the graphics when learning to code using the Unity Game Engine. I also feel this lesson opens avenues for my continued connection to the ASSIST program as I would be interested in returning next year to teach the new Kenan Fellows the basics of Arduino programming.
The third item created was a demonstration on energy harvesting. This was the most challenging product for me because now I was completely out of my element. It had to be short (no more than two pages in writing and images), involve procedural techniques, be a short exercise for students to complete, connect to the work of the ASSIST Center, and be informative on how it is possible to collect energy for use in our electric devices. What really made this a challenge for me though was that we had yet to hear the lectures that really dove into the topic of energy harvesting until the start of the final week and I had to decide what equipment I needed purchased so it would arrive prior our last day for the poster session presentation. I looked at device after device with no idea how to connect them and had a couple of items ordered with no way to relate them to one another except that they all could be used for collecting energy.
Then, on our final Monday, came a lecture and demonstration on thermoelectric generators. While failed to grasp much of the information, it helped to connect the dots for my demonstration. I quickly formulated a plan: I previously ordered a Bristlebot that operated on both battery power and solar energy as well a hand-crank DC generator. It was decided I wouldn’t use the generator for my demo. But, instead, I could have the students examine the Bristlebot running on battery power and describe what occurs and why. They could then go outside, remove the batteries, point the photovoltaic cells toward the sun and repeat the process. Finally, we could all come back together and discuss how wearable devices (and other electronics such as satellites) can operate using thermoelectric generators as their energy source both now and in the future! Post fact of submission, I think I will go back into the demonstration instructions and add measuring the voltages on the Bristlbot using a multimeter so the students can discuss the amount of energy produced.
Talk about a struggle and sucess! I was overjoyed and finished all three products for the ASSIST Center in time, which I was really stressed over and truly amazed me that I accomplished this feat! On our final day, we presented what we learned with an overview of these three products in a poster session that was open for people we invited to attend from outside our internship. Below is an image of my poster so you can see the fruit of my labor. Click on it to open for a closer look:
Poster session product