Number of downloads would provide a metric on deployment.

Riverside High school would start two teams. One team would be made up of the engineering club members and the second team would be a group of elementary and middle school students. This project is meant to serve as a summer bridge program between the high school and the elementary and middle school. The high school students will serve as mentors to the younger students. The goal is for this program to be expanded to other elementary and middle schools and become an alignment project for the high school feeder pattern.

Objective: Students will take a pre- and post-activity survey with questions to measure their attitude toward different aspects of STEM, their future classes, and their future career choice. Upon completion of the race car built, we hope to see 100% of scores as positive and demonstrate 100% of participants would want to pursue a career in STEM.

Goal – Students will demonstrate an increase in their science, technology, engineering, and math aptitude and participation.

Objective: Students will demonstrate an increase in their science, engineering, and math aptitude by increasing their grades in the science, technology, engineering, and math classes from the previous year. Also measured will be their extracurricular involvement in STEM related activities, and enrollment in advanced or specialty STEM classes compared to previous years.

The main tool for assessing the effectiveness of the project activities will be how the students fair in the national competition compared to other seasoned teams and teams competing for the first time also. Completing the car and competing in a race will be evidence of the activities being effective and successful. The students will need to travel to races in South Texas or Alabama. Students at this point would have built a racecar and travelled to another city to race the car they built.
The engineering skills and physics concepts they gain will be used to measure the effectiveness of this project. A pre and post assessment can be done on physics concepts to show an increase in concept understanding. Student scores in math, science classes can be tracked in order to determine and increase aptitude. Surveys concerning their affinity toward STEM will be given before the project starts and after the project ends. We can analyze the results of the surveys to measure if there was a change in attitude toward STEM concepts. The engineering skills they acquire during this project can be tools to measure the effectiveness of the projects. For example, students can be tested after on what is and how to use a Gantz chart, how to complete a Pugh table, or how to make a decision analysis table. Assessments based on hypothetical projects can be created to see how students would apply the engineering skill they learned.
The amount of students and the number of STEM competitions in which the participating schools compete can be used a measurement of effectiveness of the project. An increase in number of students participating in STEM activities from the year prior to the following year can be compared as can the number of competitions the school participates. Another tool to measure effectiveness can be how well the school does in competitions they have already participated in the new year, after the students have acquired the engineering skills, compared to the previous year.

Already thanks to the conferences and personal supporters in the community we’ve been able to provide information security conferences with over $15k in massages, over 20 hours of yoga. We now have more than 80 volunteers that come directly from the community that are so amazing, from helping us answer questions, surveys, running the rooms, and helping each other work through issues through peer support practices.

As Mental Health Hackers grows and receives sponsorship, we aim to expand our offerings. These include various services and support to help the information security community tackle mental health issues. It also includes improving and expanding our current key offering, the mental health and wellness village.

HocoHacks Hackathon is a student run group that organizes a countywide hackathon for all middle and high school students. This includes contacting potential sponsors, purchasing prizes, organizing the competition schedule, and contacting speakers and judges. The hackathon event is usually in the spring and lasts around 9 hours. Last year, the hackathon hosted 50 students, a mini gaming competition, and multiple raffles for students to gain tech-related prizes. The hackathon provides the opportunity for students to explore their creative ideas using technology. Throughout the competition day, the hackathon also hosts several workshops to teach inexperienced hackers.

Thus far we’ve experimented with is a tactile-audio installation for an armadillo exhibit. A visitor interaction could go like this:
– The child approaches the installation – in this case, a table with multiple parts on top – and hears audio instructions letting them know that as they touch the various parts they’ll hear audio information.
– The child reaches their hands out and feels a model of an armadillo. They run their hands over it and get an ideal of how big the animal is relative to themselves. They feel the textured armor, the ridges of the armor bands.
– As they pause their hands on the back, audio plays describing the function of the armor and how certain species can roll themselves up into an armored ball.
– The child moves their hands and lingers on the armadillo mouth. Audio plays describing that when an armadillo is threatened, it makes a sound like this: *sound*.

Through these multi-sensory installations, children with visual impairments can understand more about animals that they would have by just hearing a verbal description by a volunteer or companion.

We currently have a proof-of-concept prototype built during a one week hackathon.

Intermediate goals will be:
– A more developed prototype that looks more realistic and could be integrated into the zoo.
– A usability study/focus group to test how people interact with the prototype and how they feel about it.
– A revised prototype based on the results of the usability study.

However, through Inclusive Design our project will garner the same benefits for visiting children without visual impairments; consuming information through multiple senses is proven to result in greater information retention. The Woodland Park Zoo’s mission is to inspire a movement of people to embrace and act for wildlife conservation, but as the zoo staff told us, the word “conservation” is a scary word and an abstract concept. Our project will be designed to help visitors understand what conservation is and why it’s important on a more direct level. ZooSense will hopefully allow visiting children to empathize more with animals, understand how individual everyday actions can impact these animals, and be inspired to take action to protect these animals. Thus our project could, via a butterfly effect, impact the small-scale actions that add up to the conservation of the planet in coming years.

Working to provide more students the opportunity to participate, STEM Scouts – Denver works with schools, families, school districts, volunteers, corporate funders and other sources of funding to bring STEM education opportunities to all students, regardless of where they grow up.

With more jobs and careers shifting to automation and artificial intelligence, STEM Scouts – Denver brings engaging curriculum for students to try, fail, identify areas to improve and try again; providing hands-on opportunities reinforces what students are learning in a classroom, more traditional-schooling method.

STEM Scouts – Denver is proud to be 100% volunteer run. But, we need help in reaching more students in the Valverde neighborhood (80223) by raising the funds required to cover the cost of our engaging programming. We want to recruit students at Valverde Elementary School (2030 W Alameda Ave, Denver, CO 80223) to participate, learn and join our STEM Scouts Lab.

The half-year (14 weeks) curriculum costs $150 per student. We hope to raise $1,500 to cover the cost of 10 students to participate in our STEM Scouts Lab.

FRC competitions end in elimination matches, where we join an alliance with two other teams. A key part of FRC gameplay is to select teams that will complement Ignite’s skills to form the best alliance during final matches, so during prior “qualification” matches we collect data on other teams. First, a group of “robot scouts” watches every match and collects quantitative performance data on every team in real time. Another group of “alliance scouts” talks with teams and watches their interactions and gameplay. This data is analyzed before the final rounds to select best-fit teams for our alliance and to determine how to play against other alliances. For Ignite’s first two competition seasons this was done with pencil and paper, and the resulting analytical product was rudimentary. This year, the strategy team has written an Android-based app that can be used by the scouts to collect and synthesize data in real time, which will result in much more sophisticated products to help guide the team to victory.

Beyond Ignite, the app will be open sourced and available to many other FIRST Robotics Competition teams— especially those in Georgia, with the goal of helping those students even beyond our team learn these valuable skills.

One of my go-tos have been the creation of little Arduino bots (based on the excellent 2020bot Instructable by Jay Francis). The bodies are initially foam but once built can easily be transitioned to a laser cut or 3D printed frame. I have been paying for parts out of pocket, but it gets expensive and I am always scrambling to replace broken electronics.

I would like to fund twenty kits for the Claremont Makerspace and offer them to 3D Print Club attendees with the caveat that once they build one they must help someone else build one. I taught a couple of robot arm classes for the Kenton County Public Libraries in Kentucky that utilized this philosophy and it was extremely successful. Everyone is invested as their “prize” is a robot (and hopefully a new friend).

The robot building would culminate in a robot dance party and sumo competition.

TLDR: Pay-it-forward robot building club.

Success will be measured by a beginning and end of program survey completed by participants. It will assess both knowledge gained and whether they enjoyed the activities.

Subsequent programs will take these surveys into account to continue to tweak the program for maximum effectiveness.

The majority of attendees to 3D Print Club have been young women, I’m assuming this is because I’m introduced as a potential female mentor during my volunteer hours to those who tour the makerspace.

The dance party will be open to the community and will hopefully continue to spark more interest in building robots.

To host this, Decatur Makers will compile an affordable remote-control robot kit for purchase that includes everything for a simple robot that competitors will build, program, and personalize with unique tactical features to beat adversaries. We’ll also design and build an arena for the competition.

Anyone from the Atlanta area will be able to enter the competition; This includes boys and girls of all ages, especially those from underserved communities. To make it more accessible to a broader community, we will provide needs-based scholarships for youth to obtain free robot kits, and offering free workshops on assembly and coding of the kits. The RoboCrash Competition: Fearless with Robotics! event will expose our community to Arduino and remote control technologies, building with motors, and coding all wrapped up in the thrill and excitement of a game environment, with the hope that many will find new skills and passions.

Decatur Makers, a makerspace, has a similar ethos of a hacker community that likes to push boundaries, learn through the making of mistakes, and create for the fun of it as well as for practical purposes and for the betterment of the larger community. For this particular project, our first endeavor in engaging a larger group of makers interested in robotics, we hope to successfully sign-up a sizeable, diverse group of robot-building competitors. We hope to support and encourage this group through free workshops to help build and code the robots as well as other competitor engagement to create community around this interest. Our success will be measured by whether this group actually attends and competes in the RoboCrash Competition.

As a result of this event, Decatur Makers hopes to continue to fan the flame of interest and kickoff a Robotics club where this group creates a supportive community to lead discussions and share their skills to help others that are interested in robotics.

Decatur Makers is a welcoming, family-friendly makerspace (we allow members as young as 11 years old) with a diverse membership from all over the Atlanta area who learn and make interesting things using our tools and equipment; Our greatest asset is this wonderfully supportive community which strives to educate people to learn and create. We intentionally engage with the greater Atlanta area where hundreds of people participate with us in various ways including building communal projects, volunteering with our youth outreach, and sharing their skills. We offer classes, both paid and free, as well as host free club meetings to support various interests that are all open to the public. We have grown into a valuable community resource that directly helps address educational needs, builds community, and fosters economic opportunities for people of all ages, skill sets, and backgrounds.

Currently, the community we serve is about 50/50 men and women, about 60/40 white and a diverse non-white population, and about 30% are K-12th grade youth.

This past year, we’ve reached almost 1,500 K-12th grade youth with our STEAM and making outreach programming. Although we’ve hosted several coding workshops, we’ve not been able to support the growing interest in robotics due to funding needs.

Previously we’ve had such activities as outdoor ethernet cable crimping, mounting and testing of long-range point-to-point wireless links, flashing OpenWRT onto consumer wifi routers, basic linux wifi commands and making jewelry out of lengths of copper wire equivalent to how far a signal travels through it in 1 nanosecond.

In 2020 we’d like to add a new activity: Learning about antennas by making, testing and modifying PCB and wire antennas.

Participants will cut conductive copper tape into shapes and stick it onto plain FR4 (circuit board material). They will then get to test the resonance frequency of their improvised PCB and wire antennas using a Vector Network Analyzer and perform a rough check of antenna directionality by hooking them up to a transmitter and pointing them at different strategically-placed directional receivers. We expect much testing and re-tweaking of shapes to get the resonance frequency just right.

We’ll include a very brief presentation on guidelines for making different kinds of antennas and have volunteers to answer questions throughout.

This workshop won’t require any prior experience and will be open to all ages (under 18 to be accompanied by a parent or guardian). Everything but the copper tape and wire will be re-usable for later workshops.

For anyone interested we’ll have a follow-up session for translating the designs into KiCAD and ordering them from a PCB manufacturing company.

We will document the experience on our blog and wiki, including how many attendees we have and how many antenna prototypes were built and tested. We’ll also provide material to help others who want to run a similar workshop.

A secondary goal is to test the viability of this method of rapid PCB antenna prototyping for e.g. open hardware projects by getting a sense of the difference between the hand-prototyped antennas and the equivalent professionally manufactured antennas.

We’ll document this effort on our wiki and blog to make it easy for others to set up a similar antenna workshop, and we’ll share our successes and failures so others can improve upon the experience. We expect that this method of prototyping antennas is relatively unknown and may also be of use to more seasoned electronics engineers. We hope to provide actual numbers on the deviation between “copper tape on plain FR4” and the same design manufactured by a PCB manufacturing facility.

Our hackerspace is located walking distance from public transit (BART) and is wheelchair accessible. We distribute fliers to other local community spaces and colleges/universities. The attendance of previous workshops has varied from 10 to 60+ depending on venue (we held one at a local library) and how much energy we put into spreading the word.

Using a prototype I’ve logged thousands of pictures with so far it would be wonderful to be able to share some of the electronics skills I’ve learned and help people make something they might want to use and improve with some custom hardware and software.

The curriculum will be designed to be covered over four weeks, and by the final week they should have a pi-zero with a camera they can take pictures with all over the place and be able to upload them wirelessly. All of the required materials and equipment will be provided to the students (minus the pi zeros due to quantity restrictions on orders and batteries due to my lack of knowledge) and ideally the material should be modular enough that they shouldn’t have to make it every week to learn something cool and participate. This project will expose beginners to soldering, code (shell, python and node.js & JS scripts), custom PCB design, 3d modeling/printing and some relevant basics about electronics. There will be limited pi zeros and GPS modules for people with financial need but all other materials and tools will be provided and another raspberry pi.

We should also be able to generate lots of pics through our devices, which participants should be free to hack in to dash cams, security cameras, or strap it to their bike like me.
I’ll also work through another model with the class and leave it with the Circuit Hacking Monday examples.