Pioneers in Engineering

Spectrum

Pioneers in Engineering is a UC Berkeley student-run project that provides STEM outreach in local high schools. PIE sponsors and supports a Spring semester robot competition. Guests include Vivek Nedyavila, Andrew Vanderburg, and David Huang. pioneers.berkeley.edu

Transcripts

Speaker 1: Spectrum's next

Speaker 2: [inaudible].

Speaker 1: [00:00:30] Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news.

Speaker 3: Hi and good afternoon. My name is Brad swift and I'm the host of today's show. Our interview is with representatives of Pioneers and engineering, also known as Pi, [00:01:00] a UC Berkeley student run project. Since 2008 Pi has been doing stem outreach in bay area high schools, Pi sponsors and supports and annual spring semester robot competition, high school teams design, build and operate robots over seven weeks culminating in a thrilling final competition at the Lawrence Hall of Science Pineys UC Berkeley students to be mentors during this year as robot competition. Each [00:01:30] team gets a set of mentors to encourage and guide the team, helping them to realize their potential, explaining Pi, the stem outreach they do and why you may want to join our Vivek Nay Diallo Vala, Andrew Vanderburg and David Hawaiian onto the interview. I want to welcome you all to spectrum. And would you introduce yourselves and tell us what your major is?

Speaker 1: Hi, my name is Vivek. I'm a UX major, electrical engineering and [00:02:00] computer sciences. I'm a junior.

Speaker 4: I'm Andrew. I'm a senior physics and astronomy major.

Speaker 3: Hi, my name is David. I'm a fourth year apply math and computer science major. Andrew, can you explain the history and goals of Pioneers and engineering?

Speaker 4: Sure, so pioneer's engineering was founded in 2008 by Berkeley engineers. The general idea is that while there are a lot of good robotics competitions that provide science outreach to high school students, [00:02:30] a lot of them aren't very good at providing outreach to the students who need it. Most. The ones in the underprivileged schools. So pioneers in engineering or pie as we like to call it, is focusing on trying to provide that outreach. So we try to make it more sustainable so that they don't have to pay as much money every year and they don't have to have corporate sponsors. And we also try to make it more friendly so that they don't have to go out and search for their own mentors. They get their own mentors from UC Berkeley and we provide [inaudible].

Speaker 1: [00:03:00] And how did you decide on robots as the focus of your engineering challenge?

Speaker 4: I think that robots are kind of a gimmick. They're cool, they're exciting and they have a lot of pop culture and references. But the lessons that we teach them could be applied to engineering, all sorts of different things. Perhaps we could do a science competition and get the same teaching out of it. Robots just provide something exciting. They provide a hook and they provide a climactic final competition where they can [00:03:30] have their robots, you know, compete head to head. [inaudible]

Speaker 1: there is a certain kit aspect to what you're doing with the robots in terms of a known entity. A constraint.

Speaker 4: Yeah. So we um, give them a very well-defined kit of parts which they can use so they don't have to start from scratch because building a robot from basic electronic components and pieces of metal or plywood is really hard. So we give them a good start. We give [00:04:00] them a kit which they can build upon. They don't have to do all of the electronics. They don't have to do a lot of the tedious work, but they can do something really cool with them in the end.

Speaker 1: What's the funding source that you use for this competition?

Speaker 4: We see corporate sponsorships. We go to companies like Google, Qualcomm, Boeing, and we ask them if they can support us, if they can. We advertise for them. We put their logos on our banners and our tee shirts [00:04:30] and they also get deductions for supporting charitable causes. [inaudible]

Speaker 1: and are you a club? What is your organizational status?

Speaker 4: We are technically a project of Tau Beta Pi, which is the engineering honor society and our finances and our organization go through them. Many of our members have or no, not affiliated with Beta Pi. They are recruited by us

Speaker 1: beside the robot competition. Are there other projects within Pi [00:05:00] that you're working on? We have a team that actually goes to a high school called Ralph Bunche High School in West Oakland and this team does a program called Pie prep for these kids in which they have 13 or 14 modules of stem outreach kind of and they basically teach them cool things about science and technology and a little bit about robotics and physics and stuff like that and it's, it's once a week. It's intended to be fun and just spark their interest and also give them [00:05:30] a little bit of theoretical knowledge. This has been going very well this semester and from the results in the surveys that we've been taking, we're most likely gonna ramp it up next fall to even more schools. The exact number, we're not sure, but it's going to continue ramping up in the next few years and hopefully touch in the realm of 1314 schools in the area. We're hoping that this is going to be a very successful program and also inspire more interest in our robotics competition for the so we can have something good going on in the fall. It's [00:06:00] something in interest spring so it's like a year round kind of thing.

Speaker 3: This is spectrum on k a l x Berkeley. Today's topic is pioneers in engineering. Three representatives from Pi join us. They are Vivek, Andrew and David. Andrew. How is it that high school's become involved in the [00:06:30] competition?

Speaker 4: We do a lot of recruiting into high schools who fit our core mission, the ones who probably wouldn't be able to compete sustainably and the other robotics competitions that are out there. So we contact teachers and the sciences and we ask them if they're interested and if their students are interested in putting together a team and then they apply for a team and if we have room we'll take them.

Speaker 3: What is the limit on teams? You have a capacity issue.

Speaker 4: Yeah. We have a limit of about 20 teams could be up as many as 24 this year and the limitations [00:07:00] are put in place by our ability to produce kits and to provide mentors for them. We would rather have a good competition with 25 teams than one that stretched too thin with 35

Speaker 3: and do schools stick with it.

Speaker 4: There is a core group of schools who seem to be building up somewhat of a legacy. They'll come back year after year. We actually just had our first student who is a four year high school participant in Pi Join Pi as a staff member [00:07:30] in college.

Speaker 3: Great. That's the goal, right? In a way that's sort of the ideal. Andrew, when the teams are picked, they're picked by the teachers at the high schools.

Speaker 4: The teams are I guess collected by the teachers at the high school, but they're based on interest. We've in the past tried to limit the number of people on the team, but we're moving away from that because um, we have a lot more mentors than we have in the past.

Speaker 3: How do you try to keep the parody of the experience within [00:08:00] the teams and the resources that they have access to the equipment, the time spent? How do you, how do you try to balance all that? Keep everybody kind of on the same level.

Speaker 4: So there are teams who have access to a machine shop in their high school and we can't provide that to everyone. But we do provide as a basic set of tools to anyone who wants them. We loan them out if they want to go to the high school and work with their team. And sometimes the high schools come to UC Berkeley and they can use our tools and our workspace in O'Brian Hall [00:08:30] in north side, we also try to ration the experience level of the mentors. We tried to provide the more experienced mentors to the less experienced teams. As a general rule, we try to provide equal experience and different types of engineering to each school. So each school should hope to have a mechanical engineer or someone who's mechanically inclined and someone who is electrically inclined or programming inclined.

Speaker 1: And the number of mentors per team. Last year it ranged between four to six [00:09:00] of AVEC. Talk about your experience as a mentor on the robot competition. My experience at Ralph Bunche high school mentoring and was a series of ups and downs. But in the end it kind of culminated in something special. So started off with a few weeks of mentorship prep by um, Andrew and his mentorship team. They prepped us for what we would encounter a little bit of the social aspect of the kids, but mostly about the uh, technical mentorship. Ralph [00:09:30] onto high is a rather underprivileged high school in West Oakland. There were only three of them in the team and we had to struggle with people dropping out, people coming in because of the small size of the team, small quarrels that were involved, a lot of social issues that we were not as equipped for as mentors coming from UC Berkeley.

Speaker 1: Um, not to mention the social barrier itself of where we have all come from in our lives compared to where these kids have come from. And [00:10:00] it was a really interesting experience for me because I actually have had a little bit of experience with kids from underprivileged backgrounds and the experience that I had in pulling my mentorship team into it with me trying to get everyone on the same page with these kids to not get frustrated with them, to not unequivocally say something and like have it mar the rest of our mentorship semesters. So it was a journey and it ended up being very rewarding, um, in the sense that [00:10:30] we got second place in the robotics competition and this team of three kids who were definitely the underdogs and it was just, you know, one of those quintessential underdog stories. They ended up getting second place and I was super proud of them.

Speaker 1: So very rewarding experience. David, tell us about your experience last year as a mentor. I think the biggest and rather pleasant surprise, uh, during the tournament was at discrimination the week before and during the actual [00:11:00] tournament at the end of the season. The atmosphere was just absolutely incredible. We had, um, PAC has of spectators. We had epic music classing in the background and in both hers mining hardware. We had the scrimmage and the Lawrence Hom signs where we had to file tournament. The stage was very well prepared and when each team sent up their team members send their robot on the stage to compete. It gives you the feeling that you're these [00:11:30] stars on stage, sort of like maybe no gladiators in ancient Roman stadiums where you're the center of the attention of everyone around you and really at some level I feel like that's where colleges should be about is motivating students, motivating students, intellectual growth and also highlighting their achievements and I think in that sense

Speaker 5: the Pi robotic competition has totally exceeded my expectation. I remember seeing a couple up the high school students [00:12:00] who ended up winning the competition, just crying on the stage and joy. I have no doubt that it had been a parade and really life changing experience for them.

Speaker 3: Spectrum is on KALX Berkeley alternating Fridays. Today, we are talking with Vivec, Andrew and David about pioneers in engineering

Speaker 1: as your involvement [00:12:30] in Pi giving you some insights into where you might want to go with your major.

Speaker 4: My involvement in Pi has really been my first major experience in teaching and it turns out that teaching is a lot harder than you would think, especially teaching some of the difficult concepts that we have to do so quickly in our decal. It turns out that trying to break down the concepts into logical chunks and presenting them in a logical way is almost as hard, if not harder than learning them yourself. [00:13:00] So I found that teaching and learning to teach was a really good experience for me and it will help me presumably as I graduate and go to Grad school [inaudible]

Speaker 1: because are you thinking of being a teacher?

Speaker 4: I'm thinking of being hopefully a professor in the future. I hope that my experience in Pi will give me a leg up from working on that and hopefully make it easier for my students to learn in the future.

Speaker 3: [inaudible] David, anything. Yeah.

Speaker 5: So I try and Pi as a part of my effort to explore [00:13:30] more in computer science, which I started taking classes last year and I have to say during the course of last semesters tournament, I really enjoy working with the staff member, other fellow UC Berkeley students and Pi. And I also really enjoy working with the high school students on my team to the extent that, uh, I'm starting to look more and more into the idea of working at a technology startup. And I'm also fairly sure I'm going to do computer science as a second major along with math. [00:14:00] And so in that sense, I think it's really solidify my interests in this field.

Speaker 1: VEC, how has pi affected your plans for the future? I've actually had, I guess in the last few weeks to think about this very seriously. And through talking with a number of people in Pie, I'm very, very inclined to do something kind of like this as a job in the future. Like being scientific outreach. Yeah, exactly. Scientific kind [00:14:30] of stem education. Stem outreach. Yeah. So there's um, a company called sparkfun that we have grown closer to over the last year and this is kind of exactly what they do. They have a sparkfun kit circuit skit and it's a solderless circuit skit where they can bring it to elementary, middle school classrooms and have these kids play around with circuits. They want to fund a trip across the nation teaching stuff like this to little kid. Just seeing things like this happen in the world makes me really rethink, do [00:15:00] I just want to become a fabrications engineer or something or like do I want to be a programmer or do I need something like this without there the risks are higher, but the reward, the potential reward is greater. Yeah, that's, that's how it's changed my outlook. What sort of a time commitment is there to being a Pi staffer or a mentor?

Speaker 4: So being a mentor, we ask that you attend a two hour day call once a week. We ask that you mentor your teams [00:15:30] for at least two hours a week. And we also ask that you do a five minute progress report so that we know how your teams are doing. So if you add in transportation time, it's probably adds up to about six to eight hours a week of time commitment. That won't be distributed evenly necessarily because there'll be weeks where you have weekend events, which lasts all day. But I think that most peer mentors have found that the time commitment really isn't a problem because by the time that the time coming and gets large, [00:16:00] you really want to be there and it's a lot of fun.

Speaker 1: And then for staff, so I know this isn't the time for staff to get involved or are you always looking for staff or is it really just at the fall?

Speaker 4: So we're always looking for staff. We do need mentors more than staff at this moment, but as a staff member, the time commitment is probably larger, probably order of 10 hours a week for the seven or eight weeks around the competition. At other times it's less, more [00:16:30] of a year long job than this intense seven week period as it would be for a mentor.

Speaker 1: Andrew, if you want to become a mentor, what's the process? Okay.

Speaker 4: For people who are interested in being mentors to the high school students, we are going to have a mentoring decal which starts in early February. On February 4th that decal will run from six to 8:00 PM on Mondays and Thursdays. And it's once a week. You choose one of those two times and uh, you come to that, you learn [00:17:00] about robotics and then we scheduled for a seven week period starting in March time for you to go to your high schools every week. That's flexible, depends on your schedule, on the high school schedule. The final competition will wrap up around April 28th

Speaker 1: and the kind of people you're looking for talk about who can be a mentor,

Speaker 4: right? So we accept mentors from every background. We believe that our decal will teach them the basics that can get them [00:17:30] to help their high school students out. And we also believe that learning about engineering is not the only purpose of Pi. We think that other students from other backgrounds can contribute just as much as engineers can because in the end it's not just about teaching them to be engineers, it's about teaching them to go to college, what it's like to be in college, what it's like, enjoy learning and some of our best mentors in the past have not been engineers.

Speaker 6: [inaudible]

Speaker 3: [00:18:00] pioneers in engineering on spectrum detailing their stem outreach. This is k a l X.

Speaker 6: [inaudible].

Speaker 3: Do you all find Pi to be a real supportive community for your own personal interests as well as the collective interest of doing the competition and start with the Vac, right. [00:18:30] Then we'll go around.

Speaker 1: For me it's the spirit of kind of like self-expression. You're doing something very special for these kids. It's a form of giving someone else what I had when I was a kid in the form of my dad or in the form of other people in my life who influenced me towards engineering and to motivate kids or like allow them to have that confidence in themselves. To go towards stem and at least higher education, one of the main goals of Pie. [00:19:00] Don't be afraid to apply to college and stuff like that. That form of self expression and just kind of helping these kids and self fulfillment through that, that the perk that I get,

Speaker 4: I feel as if Pi is a really supportive community because even though the going is often tough as a staff member, there's a lot of pressure because he wants to deliver a good competition to the students. Everyone's willing to help each other out. And I think that it's a really good community to have around you because [00:19:30] even though we're all doing a lot of work and sometimes we can get stressed, we remember that we have each other and that we're all working towards a common goal, which is to give these students a good educational experience. And that's something that a lot of them don't get in school.

Speaker 5: So coming from the perspective of surf a semi insider outsider, uh, as a pass mentor, um, I think Pi has given me the opportunity to meet a lot of other people who are similarly interested in science and engineering [00:20:00] from the perspective that these are wonderful things to learn about and to see happen in everyday life instead of just something that you learned together job. And going along that perspective, having met all these really interesting people, empire has given me more social avenues to while to hang out, for instance, for Thanksgiving or just took walk around campus and to know that there are all these people around me who are also likewise striving for a similar goal. And that's comforting to know.

Speaker 3: [00:20:30] Vivek, Andrew and David, thanks very much for being on spectrum. Thank you. Thank you for having us.

Speaker 2: [inaudible] now our calendar of local science and technology events over the next two weeks, Renee Rao and Ricardo [inaudible] present the calendar.

Speaker 7: [00:21:00] Okay. Dr. Shannon Bennett, associate curator of microbiology at the California Academy of Sciences. We'll be hosting a lecture by HIV expert, Dr Leo Weinberger, who will discuss the engineering of a retro virus to cure HIV. While progress has been made in controlling the virus with heavy cocktails or combinations of drugs, more virulent and resistant varieties continue to arise, Weinberger will explore his idea of using the same virus that causes the disease to deliver [00:21:30] the cure. The event will be held at 12:00 PM on Saturday, January 26 tickets will be on sale at the California Academy of Sciences website, $15 for adults and seven for students or seniors. Martin Hellman,

Speaker 8: the co-inventor of public key cryptography is presenting the free Stanford engineering hero lecture at the Long Engineering Center at Stanford on Tuesday, January 29th from seven to 9:00 PM [00:22:00] with reception after his talk on the wisdom of foolishness, explorers, how tilting at windmills can turn out. Well in the 1970s Homan was competing with the national security agency who had a much larger budgets than he had, and it was warned that the NSA may classify any accomplishments he made. Despite this with help from Whitfield Diffie and Ralph Merkle, Hellman spearheaded systems that are still used to secure Chileans of dollars of financial [00:22:30] transactions a day. Visit www. That's certain.com for more info

Speaker 7: east based first nerd night of 2013 we'll feature three Speakers, Daniel Cohen, a phd candidate in the joint UC Berkeley UCLA program. We'll speak about the theme of collective behavior, discussing the mechanism for everything from hurting sheep to sell your cooperation. Andrew Pike, a u Penn geologist by trade has also been [00:23:00] a contender in the competitive rock paper, Scissors League of Philadelphia. He will discuss some of the surprisingly complex strategies to the game. Lena Nielsen, the Innovation Director at the Bluhm center for developing economies at UC Berkeley. We'll explore technological solutions to extreme global problems that are also financially feasible. The event will start at eight but doors open at seven the event is held on January 28th at the new parkway located at four seven four [00:23:30] 24th street in Oakland. Science fans of all ages are welcome and can purchase the $8 tickets online.

Speaker 8: On Tuesday, February 5th at 6:00 PM the Felix Block, a professor in theoretical physics at and the director of the Stanford Institute for theoretical physicist, Leonard Susskind is talking to the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco located at five nine five market street. The presentation is entitled the theoretical minimum, [00:24:00] what you need to know to start doing physics Susskind. We'll discuss how to learn more about physics and how to think more like a scientist. He will provide a toolkit to help people advance at their own pace. The cost is $20 to the public, $8 to members and $7 to students. Visit www that commonwealth club.org four tickets.

Speaker 7: UC Berkeley's center for emerging and neglected diseases will hold its fifth annual [00:24:30] symposium this year. A variety of Speakers will present their work in various areas of infection and host response. The theme of the symposium, the keynote Speaker, dawn Ghanem will explore new developments in malaria drugs across the world. Sarah Sawyer, another Speaker. We'll discuss what typically keeps animal viruses from infecting humans. Other topics will include emerging African biomedical research on HIV AIDS, mycobacterium [00:25:00] tuberculosis, and new testing protocols for infectious diseases in developing countries. The symposium will be held in Stanley Hall on the UC Berkeley campus on February 11th from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM it's open to anyone who [e-mail] health.berkeley.edu

Speaker 2: [inaudible]

Speaker 8: [00:25:30] the two news items [inaudible] that can Renee, university of Cambridge researchers published an article in Nature Chemistry on January 20th that indicates DNA conform not only the classic double stranded Helix, but also structures that are made from four strands. It's been thought that these square shaped g quadroplex structures may form in the DNA of cells, but this paper is one of the first to provide evidence that they do exist [00:26:00] in human cells. They forum when four Guanines make a special type of hydrogen bond.

Speaker 8: The telomeres that protect Chromosomal DNA are Irish and Guanine and research points to quadroplex formation. And there is evidence that suggests quadruplex formation could damage these Tila mirrors and may play a role in how certain genes contribute to cancer. The team created a simple antibody that stabilizes these g quadroplex structures and showed how the structures are [00:26:30] formed and trapped in human DNA. When describing the long term goals of the research, the team told science daily that many current cancer treatments attack DNA, but it's not clear what the rules are. We don't aware in the genome some of them react. It can be a scattergun approach. The possibility that particular cancer cells harboring genes with these motifs can now be targets and appear to be more vulnerable to interference than normal cells is that thrilling prospect.

Speaker 7: Okay. A joint [00:27:00] UC Berkeley Duke University Study of couches across the nation reveals a disturbingly high percentage of our sofas contained noticeable levels of toxins. 102 couches in 27 states were examined in this study. Of these 41% were found to contain the chemical chlorinated Tris, a known carcinogen. 17% of the couches also contain Penta BDE, which can cause hormonal disruptions. While chlorinated Tris was banned [00:27:30] from use in children's clothing in the 1970s it continues to be routinely used by companies seeking to make foam furniture more fire resistant. Currently, California State Law requires a certain degree of flame retardancy, but does not require that the types or amount of chemicals used to achieve this be disclosed. Well, most cotton will or down catches are naturally flame resistant. Any foam catches will almost certainly require added chemicals to meet current standards. Last June, [00:28:00] Governor Jerry Brown advised the state legislature to reform flammability standards for furniture. Once the new regulations are adopted, the chemical free couches should be available.

Speaker 2: [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible]. The music art during the show is by on a David from his album folk and acoustic released under [00:28:30] a creative Commons license 3.0 attributes. [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible]. [00:29:00] Yeah. Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have common staff to show, please send them to us via email. All right, email address is spectrum dot [e-mail] join us in two weeks. This same time.

Speaker 9: [inaudible] [00:29:30] [inaudible] [inaudible].

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