This fall at Centaurus High School in Lafayette, mechanical engineering PhD student and GK-12 TEAMS Fellow Brandi Jackson Briggs is teaching a semester-long biomedical engineering course for the school's Pre-Engineering Academy.
The course focuses on how engineering contributes to society through the design of a remote-controlled, motorized device that explores the abdominal cavity in search of endometriosis. The unique design of the abdominal cavity itself simulates the real look and feel of a human abdomen. The 30 Centaurus High School students have found the project to be an exciting application of engineering and now think of biomedical engineering as a possible career interest.
The biomedical project, created by Briggs and former GK-12 Fellow Ben Terry, also a mechanical engineering PhD student, has been developed into a multi-lesson curriculum, "Next Generation Surgical Tools," that will soon be available on TeachEngineeering.org, the NSF-funded digital library collection developed under the leadership of Associate Dean Jacquelyn Sullivan.
CU aerospace alumnus Jim Hansen, a former All Big-Eight tackle and Rhodes scholar who now works at the Naval Research Laboratory in Monterey, California, spoke to students in the Herbst Humanities and Engineering Honors programs, and then presented "Cloudy with a Chance of Pirates," a public talk about his work using predictive modeling techniques to combat pirate activity off the coast of Somalia. The Oct. 20 events were hosted by CU Engineering Alumni Relations and Engineering Development.
Students participating in ASEN 2500 Gateway to Space launched the small payloads they designed and built this semester on a high-altitude balloon near Windsor, Colorado on Nov. 6.
