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Day 11- Clean Room Activities!

July 17, 2012 by

Day 11 started off like a typical day, where we edited some laboratories for a couple of hours.  The labs are now very close to being done their first revision; after we complete the labs for ourselves we will re-edit them!

We had a brown bag lunch, where Professor Thomas Bifano talked to us about adaptive optics, as well as being an entrepreneur.  Professor Bifano did a fantastic job explaining to us all about adaptive optics, and I had no idea that it was classified until very recently!

After our brown bag lunch, we went to the cleanroom on the 8th floor of the BU Photonics building.  We dressed in the required garments, and learned about the clean room.  Here’s one of the 100 or so pictures taken in the cleanroom. 

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We did laser lithography in the cleanroom.  If you look at the mask that I created in the Day 10 post, that’s what the finished product should look like.  It was intense using so many different machines and learning the process of laser lithography.  This took basically the rest of the day.  I’ll hopefully post more pictures for you in the near future!

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Day 10- Almost done labs!

July 16, 2012 by

Today started off pretty well- I drove in from Sunderland, like I do on Mondays.  It only took 2 hours and 20 minutes.  I should have left a little earlier, but it happens to the best of us on Mondays. 

Fjodor and I started working on our Mask templates, as we are going in the cleanroom tomorrow.  I have my camera charged and ready to go, because I know tomorrow is going to be a fantastic day for photo opportunities!  Here is a screenshot of my mask template!

2012-07-16 04.08.22 pm

After finishing the mask template, we went to work on the labs.  We are pretty well edited, at least every single one has been touched by both of us- twice.  Around noon, Nate stopped by and gave us our data logger for the high-altitude balloon launch, which had arrived from our first order.

At 12:45pm, we had a BUSAT brown bag lunch, where we watched about the newest Mars mission, and watched the press conference.  It was really cool to watch an interesting event with a lot of people interested in it.  That sounds like a vague statement, but I promise it’s not.

If you’d like to learn more about the Mars Rover, Curiosity, check it out on the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s website: http://marsprogram.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/.  There are all kinds of educational activities there.

We spent the rest of the day editing laboratories and coming up with an updated timeline of when we hope to accomplish each step.  I decided that I’m going to try to spend the end of each workday blogging, so that I don’t have to spend time outside of here doing so! 

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Day 9- Typical day so far!

July 13, 2012 by

This week’s pedagogy session was more self-directed, so Fjodor and I have more time to edit laboratories after we finish that.  We spend the beginning of the morning reviewing the required pedagogy materials, and then started editing labs.  I do have some questions to answer for this weeks lab.

What is the hypothesis you are testing?

The hypotheses that we’re testing is as follows:

Near space conditions will not affect the electronics circuits in our homemade temperature sensors.

A modified cell phone with GPS is able to replace a full fledged GPS unit.

What kind of controls does the experiment have?

The controls we will have are manufactured and calibrated thermometers purchased from a local store.

A GPS locator will be placed on board to see how accurate our modified cell phone unit was.
How will you measure your results?

Results will be measured by an Adafruit data logger, which will be connected to our sensors.

How will the reliability of your data be ensured?

Reliability will be ensured with multiple controls, which will allow us to test for internal consistency.

For the rest of the day, Fjodor and I are planning on finishing the editing of a few laboratories, and working on our MASK template for next week’s clean room experiment.  I can’t wait to show you some of those pictures!

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Day 8- Editing labs, rejoicing with BUSAT undergrads

July 12, 2012 by

Today was again pretty uneventful in our world; we’re making the laboratories better/ easier to understand for high school teachers/ high school students.  We’ve almost finished 2 labs right now, with work done to the other 3 (4 really, we’ve yet to start writing our test balloon lab). 

The cool thing that happened towards the end of today was that the undergraduates in our laboratory finally finished the project that they are working on, and are creating their final document.  They made an model of an optical sensor with a 3d printer, and have been spending countless hours making everything work.  Today, everything finally started to work, and they were able to see, through diffraction, different lights and how many bands there are.  It was really awesome to watch something that started off as a dream to them come to a reality.  While it isn’t groundbreaking research, it’s something that they should be very proud of!  Congrats Jonah and Pete!  I was certainly impressed by your work!

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Day 7- Waiting for Supplies

July 11, 2012 by

We’ve been editing laboratories for our Near Space components without the materials; we’re still waiting on the shipment to come in.  It gets tedious editing laboratories all day long, so today I learned a few different skills.  The first of which will come in handy for when we take video of all of the laboratories: video editing.

We are going to be making videos of all of the laboratories, so I taught myself basic video editing skills in iMovie and Adobe Premiere Pro 5.5.  It was interesting to learn these skills, as I’m planning on recording a weekly recap of my classroom next year, and posting it online so students may access it from anywhere to review topics discussed in class.

The rest of the day was pretty uneventful; we edited laboratories.  They are taking a lot more time than we had anticipated, but there is little yet to do as we’re still waiting on our supplies to come in.

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Day 6- Lab revision, being a good presenter

July 10, 2012 by

Today’s commute started out much better than the day before, 52 minutes door to door, which is probably my best time so far.  It’s crazy how sometimes the trains arrive much earlier, and sometimes they arrive much later.  My trip usually averages to about 63 minutes door to door. 

We started out revising labs again.  Fjodor is still working on the first lab, which I had thought was completed.  There’s always revision to be done, but I’d really like to get the laboratories all edited so that we can then do a test run and then revise them more based on the labs.

I’m doing a ton of review of physics, as I haven’t covered this material since my Physics 131/132 classes with Heath Hatch at UMass Amherst.  I really enjoyed circuits though, so it’s fun to play around with satellite parts and the such.

We had a Brown Bag lunch with the other RETs, in which Mike Ruane gave a presentation on how to give good presentations.  Mike talked about all kinds of aspects to think about, from PowerPoint themes to scientific posters, and eventually publishing research.  I’ve thought about some of this before,  but there were some new aspects to me.

In the afternoon, we went back to editing labs, and then Mike came and visited us.  We talked more about our project, heard what the other groups were doing, and talked about timing.  We should be all set, and we’re busy this summer, but it’s not impossible.

I then went to the Prudential center with Alex Schwartz (who’s looking for a teaching job…please hire him, he’s a great teacher) and caught up.  Man, I love living in the city.

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Day 5- Revision, Revision, and More Revision

July 9, 2012 by

Monday started out very hectic, as I there was a huge accident on I90 near Framingham, and the usually 2 hour (with traffic) commute took me about 3 hours and 35 minutes.  Fjodor was also running late, as he had went home to Worcester for the weekend, and was also stuck in the traffic. 

When we finally did start work, we kept revising Lab 1 and Lab 2.  Our goals for this week are to make it through all of the labs, which is starting to seem very ambitious. 

We started revising the labs, and more revision leads to more ideas, and more ideas lead to more revisions, and so on. 

We had a BUSAT brown bag lunch, and updated the rest of BUSAT on our project.  It was exciting talking to and hearing from many different undergraduate and graduate students about what exactly they are doing on a week by week basis.

In the afternoon, we met with Jean, our new graduate student friend.  She is helping us to construct the cut down mechanism for our balloon.  This mechanism is required by the FAA, as the Balloon must have two methods of dropping its payload.  One is the balloon bursting, the other is the cut down mechanism. 

We went through and tallied up the supplies we would need for the cutoff mechanism and then ordered them.  We’re still waiting for our supplies, so until then, we are revising labs.

Here is the diagram of our cut down mechanism:

cutdown

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Day 4- Teacher Pedagogy First Week

July 6, 2012 by

Today, we’ve started out the day by starting the first of our teacher pedagogy settings.  It reminds me of the technology class that I took in graduate school with Ruth-Ellen Verock-O’laughlin.  We spent the morning talking about different types of technology tools, and demonstrating how we use technology in each of our classrooms.  It was awesome to learn about some tools that I have never heard of, including Turn It In plagiarism checker, Socrative Student Response System (which is sort of like Poll Everywhere that I use), and Glogster, an online poster making website.

There are guiding questions that we have now as we try to finish up this session blogging about different responsibilities.  I didn’t realize we only have to do a blog post a week, but I’ll keep posting daily so the entire experience is well document.

The first question is to describe my process of assimilation into the laboratory.  I have had a fantastic week getting to know Fjodor, my lab partner, as well as Jonah and Pete, the undergraduates that work in the lab.  It’s also been great working with Project Manager Nate to go over the entire program.

The next question about the environment of the laboratory.  I like to think that our laboratory is very laid back, but in a productive way.  We have been receiving our equipment, so it’s always fun to see new cardboard boxes appear on our desk every day.  Really, I’m having a fantastic time.

I am working (as you know) with BUSAT to develop a series of laboratories for middle and high school students, incorporating science and technology with engineering.  My partner is Fjodor, who works at Somerville High School.  We’re working with a bunch of Undergraduate and Graduate students to accomplish our ultimate goal of testing equipment with a balloon launch from Mt. Greylock.

The essence of our research is how to teach students about near space experiences.  One facet is teaching the students about near space through a variety of labs, and the second facet is making meaningful labs that can be used for a variety of settings.

We haven’t really run into many challenges during week 1.  I had expected that it would be difficult to jump into the program, but Fjodor and I have been doing a fantastic job, and we’re ahead of the timeline that we had established at the beginning of the program. 

We’re planning on heading to lunch, and continuing work this afternoon on finishing up two projects- hacking our cameras with CHDK, so that they will take pictures every 30 seconds, and finishing up our supply inventory so we can place the order. 

Tonight I go back to Western Massachusetts- it’ll be nice to get out of the city for a break, as much as I love it here!

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Day 3- Supplies and Camera Hacking

July 6, 2012 by

Fjodor and I started the day a little slow, as we were both exhausted from the Fourth of July.  We started out today like we have started out the last couple of days; planning on what to cover over the day.

The first thing we started to work on was to continue editing our first laboratory.  We had a starting template from BUSAT, but it seemed very technical.  We were working on making electronics accessible to any middle or high school teacher in the sciences or engineering.

We edited the laboratory until lunch time, and actually finished both the teacher and student editions.  We are going to perform that lab in two weeks, building the components to see exactly how the laboratory works out.

We went to lunch with some of the other teachers, and saw colleagues we haven’t seen much since the start of training.  It was great to catch up and find out what other people were studying.

We then went to an afternoon meeting with Nate, and reviewed our progress for the week.  We would have had our typical meeting date of Wednesday at 1pm, but we had Wednesday off to celebrate the Fourth of July.  We went over supplies, and started talking about our next important task: hacking cameras.

We bought Canon cameras for our balloon launch, but the camera’s features don’t offer continuous shooting for as long as the battery permits.  Therefore, we need to load the Canon Hack Development Kit (CHDK- http://chdk.wikia.com/wiki/CHDK) and hack the camera so it provided the features that we needed.  Unfortunately, we didn’t have any SD cards, so we researched the process but were unable to complete it.

The last two tasks we did were 1. assemble a final supply list, and 2. find out if we can run the labs with the other teachers.  We decided we wanted to build temperature sensors with the other teachers and plot possible balloon launch landing zones, to test these labs and receive feedback on them. 

We finally set up a time for July 27th, for the labs to work with the other teachers.  The last thing Fjodor and I need to do in regards to this session is register a laboratory and receive the supplies.

Speaking of supplies, we found the inventory for last year, so we started our purchase order spreadsheet.  We will continue hacking the camera’s after borrowing Nate’s SD card and finish up our order spreadsheet.

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Day 2- We’re ahead of our schedule!

July 4, 2012 by

Day 2 started out with me taking the train in, and getting there an hour early.  I worked on some catch up reading until the lab opened at 9 am.

Fjodor and I decided that we are going to start each day setting our daily goals.  Our daily goals were to finish figuring out what supplies we needed, inventory the goods that we had already received, and start compiling questions for Nate for the meeting we were going to have on Thursday.

We got through all of those goals in about an hour, so we started constructing our first lab: Introduction to Electronics.  It’s interesting planning a laboratory with another teacher, because you each have different perspectives on what makes a “good” lab. 

Fjodor and I talked a lot about labs and education in general in preparation for editing the labs.  We then started editing the first lab, and split it into a Teacher’s edition and Student’s edition.

The teacher’s edition has references to Massachusetts and National Frameworks, setup tips, ways to pull students in, and additional resources.  We started work on expanding the laboratory to give students a greater understanding and make it inquiry-based.

We had another brown bag lunch, but this time it was with all of the other RETs.  Helen Fawcett was our speaker, and she gave a fantastic talk on “Project Management & Research Skills.”

We ended the day working more on the labs.  We had planned on starting to edit the labs next Monday, so we are already ahead of our timeline!  We get tomorrow off, so I’m going to the Esplanade to celebrate the 4th of July!

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