During the 2014 summer I worked at the Edgerton Center. The center was started in the name of Harold “Doc” Edgerton, an engineer who further developed the field of photography through his work in stroboscopic photography, and who encouraged his students to learn about engineering through a hands-on approach.
A part of the center is its K-12 outreach among the local Cambridge and Boston students. During the summer, the center hosts several summer programs and also assists other MIT departments’ programs. The main focus of these programs are engineering and science topics such as mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, chemistry, biology, and optics.
As a summer worker, I was dealing with a variety of tasks. Mainly, I interacted with the students and helped them on a one-on-one basis whenever they needed help with the activities. The students ranged in age from incoming middle school students to incoming high school students.
Behind the scenes, there was also database management; the student’s data was placed into a FileMaker database in order to easily manage name tags, forms, and handouts. Different activities required different amount of preparing. For example, an activity where students learn about the different states of matter through making lip balm had a certain “recipe” that was taught to the students. In past years, this recipe had been a difficult one because the final result had caused the solid wax and butter to separate from the oil and pigment, or for the final color to be dull, unlike what the original pigment looked like. The preparation involved testing to see which ingredients were problematic and to find better methods to prevent the dull color or separation. During the different summer programs, I was also asked to photograph the activities.
Slide show for photos of the Lego Car Rally activity
Some activities taught during the summer aren’t offered during the year. These usually have a large time requirement or are easier to teach to small groups, such as glass fusing, the Traffic Light Activity, and Techno Threads, an activity where students learn about circuits by sewing LEDs unto their clothing or apparel. This summer included a new two-week program that meant making an underwater glider.
Above: (Left) Final result of the Traffic Light activity. Students learn about parallel and series circuits and capacitors. They make the circuit on a breadboard and then transfer and solder unto the PCB. (Right) Students design their own glass plate to fuse. This is my design.
Coming into MIT, I had very little knowledge regarding the field of electrical engineering and computer science. I was forced to grow faster than I had ever grown before in my knowledge of math and science during my first year at MIT. My time at the Edgerton Center meant reinforcing what I had learned; teaching other students the basics of the concepts I had learned in the past year and fixing their mistakes allowed me to gain an intuition for those concepts. For example, a common lesson taught during the school year at Edgerton included a simple circuit with an LED, a battery, a switch, and a resistor. The amount and variety of mistakes that a 10 year old can make trying to put the circuit together is more than I had previously imagined. It required me to see the circuit from the child’s perspective and reword what I knew from classes like 6.01 (Introduction to EECS 1) and 8.02 (Electricity and Magnetism) so that I could explain to the student in his words what and why things had gone wrong.