Rice helps Houston teachers get a grip
Engineering workshop helps schools meet state requirements

BY MIKE WILLIAMS
Rice News staff

Patricia Smalling made a few adjustments and tried again. This time the gripper closed on the Styrofoam cup and held it fast, lifting it off the workbench.

“I don’t like that sound,” said James Young, noting a slight grinding of the Lego kit’s gears. With another quick adjustment by Smalling, the problem was gone.

	JEFF FITLOW
	Rice Professor James Young watches as a REDE team’s robotic arm flips a Styrofoam cup during the second week of the program for high school teachers. From left are Marie Levine of Westbury High School, Christine Mandilag of Scarborough High School, Young and Patricia Smalling of Reagan High School. All the schools are part of the Houston Independent School District.

Smalling was one of a dozen high school teachers who took up residence in Rice’s Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen over the past two weeks, where they were charged with designing and building prosthetic hands as part of the Rice Engineering Design Experience (REDE). The goal of the workshop was to give teachers the knowledge and skills to motivate students and perhaps encourage them to pursue studies in engineering.

REDE is Rice’s response to Texas’ recently enacted “four-by-four” program that requires students to take four courses in math and four in the sciences to graduate from high school.

“The usual science courses — biology, chemistry and physics — account for three years,” said Young, director of the REDE program and a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Rice. “The fourth has to be experimental or experiential in nature, and one of the five approved courses is engineering design and problem solving. Very few high school teachers are prepared to teach engineering design. 

“In fact, a lot of them are kind of terrified of the ‘E’ word. They’re smart people but they don’t have any exposure to engineering design.”

Though the summer course lasted only two weeks, teachers from the Houston Independent School District (HISD) and Kipp Inc., a state charter school, were beginning a two-year process that will give them not only experience in solving practical engineering problems but also Rice graduate credits in education. At the end of the design- and project-based workshop, they were given materials to take back to their classrooms.

By Tuesday of the second week, Smalling, a career and technology instructor at HISD’s John H. Reagan High School, and her team were fine-tuning the device they had programmed to pick up the cup and tip it for pouring and also to grip and lift a marker. “We’re tweaking our program, but other than that we’re happy with our design,” said Smalling, who teamed with Christine Mandilag of Scarborough High School and Marie Levine of Westbury High School, both part of HISD.

JEFF FITLOW
Wilfred Stewart, a teacher at HISD’s Barbara Jordan High School, lifts a plastic ball with the robotic arm extension he designed with his class partner, Kate Murphy of the KIPP Houston school.

All were aware that at week’s end, their school principals and district administrators would visit the design kitchen for a demonstration session.

Young chose the hand project from an IEEE database of real-world engineering projects that he modified for the workshop. The project uses Lego Mindstorms system as a rapid prototyping system. By the end, each team’s hand had to be able to grip a Styrofoam cup and lift it five 5 inches — full and empty, he said. “There’ll be extra points if they can pick up other kinds of things, like a marker, or an egg.”

Teachers also had to decide who would use the device and design an appropriate control mechanism. “Presumably, the user is someone without a hand, but they have to decide how much capability the user has and then develop the control. It could work by sight or sound, blowing into a pneumatic device, muscle tension or a switch,” said Young.

“The goal is not really the output of the project, but to put them through the process.”

REDE instructors will support teachers throughout the school year with classroom check-ins before bringing the group back to Rice for a two-week session next summer, with another academic year of follow-up.

REDE is funded by the state’s Teacher Quality Grants Program, which is administered by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board. The workshop was organized by Rice’s George R. Brown School of Engineering and the Southeast Regional Texas STEM Center.

For information on the Teacher Quality Grants Program, visit www.thecb.state.tx.us/os/TQ/.

For more about the workshop, visit www.utmb.edu/tstem/rede/rede_info.pdf.