STEM Infuses NYU School of Engineering Summer Vacation

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 07/10/14

It's raining down STEM in New York City this summer. Numerous programs are underway, involving a quarter of the New York University School of Engineering full-time faculty, 90 NYU student "fellows," dozens of K-12 teachers and hundreds of middle and high school students participating in camps, workshops, courses and research projects to immerse participants in science, technology, engineering and math activities.

Tagged #STEMNOW by the School of Engineering and its Center for K12 STEM Education, the overall initiative is intended to promote STEM education among educators and young people.

Programs include:

• Applied Research Innovations in Science and Engineering (ARISE) is putting on a seven-week college-level program for 35 10th and 11th graders with little exposure to STEM. They'll learn about civil and urban engineering, composite materials, mechanics, molecular design, robotics, sensors, and protein engineering from a team of 32 grad students and 14 NYU instructors.
• In a new initiative NYU's Applying Mechatronics to Promote Science and Central Brooklyn STEM will train graduate students and 18 teachers from Brooklyn schools to go into the schools to train other teachers in STEM topics and help students learn about robotics as well as other science and engineering topics.
• The Code Liberation Foundation, which offers free workshops to help women learn how to create video games, is running two weekly series this summer through NYU's Media and Games Network (MAGNET) space: "Web-Based Storytelling" and "Embodied Play."
• MAGNET will also host four summer workshops for special needs students in game development, music and audio engineering, building virtual environments and 3D models and 3D design and printing.
• NYU is running summer courses for high schoolers in engineering, pre-calculus, Web design and science and technology studies.
• The university will also host two tuition-free rounds of "Computer Science and Cyber Summer Security Program for Young Women," to introduce high school girls, specifically to opportunities in the field of cyber security. Participants will meet women performing the work and learn programming, "virtuous hacking" and digital forensics.
• Creativity in Engineering, Science, and Technology (CrEST) has set up a mobile operation, sending out six trained high school students into community-based summer camps, where they'll teach middle school students physical computing, mechanical systems, electronics and sensor use.
• Seven students from Brooklyn Technical High School will work alongside five NYU professors as well as graduate students to conduct advanced research in areas such as wireless medical technology, cybersecurity, bioengineering and mechanical and civil engineering.
• NYU engineering students will teach 54 central Brooklyn middle schoolers the science of "smart cities," including hands-on coverage of energy, urban infrastructure, transportation and wireless communications.
• Science and Mechatronics Aided Research for Teachers (SMARTER) is teaming middle and high school teachers with NYU faculty and graduate students for two weeks of advanced STEM workshops and four weeks of research. The goal is to help the teachers return to their schools ready to set up and run their own engineering programs.

"This institution has historically admitted many young people from New York's neighborhoods and helped them to obtain the knowledge and skills to become successful scholars, researchers, entrepreneurs and highly valued employees," said K.R. Sreenivasan, NYU's School of Engineering president and dean. "Our experience in K-12 engineering programs proves how powerfully we can change students' lives, particularly by working with their teachers, who disperse their knowledge throughout their schools."