Month: February 2024

Weekly Progress Update

This week, I will be working through preliminary research into related subjects and request interviews with people who have experience with certain facets that I will be tapping into during my project.

Data Sonification

Data Sonification will be extremely important for this project. Turning data into sound in a way that young students can understand will be necessary for this projects success. There are many aspects of data sonification that I did not think about before I did some research over this week.

Data Sonification refers to displaying data through sound. A lot of the ideas that I learned about this subject came from a LinkedIn Learning podcast interview between Bill Shander, Miriam Quick, and Duncan Geere. This field of data display has been historically underutilized.

It is most notably used in the field of astronomy. Outside of astronomy, it is am underutilized field. Data Sonification has some drawbacks, especially in comparison to Data Visualization. Sonification is challenging to represent to the public. Everyone knows about bars, lines, and dots, but a lot of people do not have the knowledge of tempo, pitch, and dynamics. At this moment in time, Data Sonification is mostly used as an art form. It may not be as versatile as the visual representation.

This does not mean that auditory representation of data does not have its positives. It can be harder hitting than visual data. It also can be used as a tool for equity, because it allows visually impaired people to interpret data that they normally may not be able to.

Robotics

I watched a short LinkedIn Learning course on the most important skills for a robotics engineer to have. The course is from Free the Data Academy and Ben Sullins. Three aspects of robots that stood out to me is the sensor and actuator combination, the programming, and the human-computer interaction. Actuators are how a robot moves, it turns electrical signals into movement. Sensors are how a robot takes in information. Programming takes in the data from the sensors, and then tell the robot to move in a specific way dependent on the data. It will use algorithms to move more effectively, efficiently, or interact with complex environments safely. Human-computer interaction may be the most important idea for robotics in the upcoming years. Robotics have gotten to a point where they can do tasks better than humans in many scenarios, but they still are not well trained in interacting with humans.

Interview Requests

I requested informational interviews from two people this week. The people I contacted are Sean Rowe and Robert Grover. Sean Rowe runs the Hatfield Marine Science Visitor Center through Oregon State University. Robert Grover is the CEO of aRobotics, the company responsible for DataBots. They both responded to me, and I am in the process of setting up informational interviews with them. I will write longer posts after I speak with them.

I am also in the process of setting up a tour at Chet Udell’s OPEnS Lab at Oregon State University. OPEnS stands for Openly Published Environmental Sensing. They make environmental sensors, build open sourced code for environmental sensing, and deploy the sensors into the real world. The lab’s work with environmental and biological sensing could provide helpful insight for my work in collecting sensor data from plants.

Introduction to URSA

Hello to everyone who stumbles across this blog. My name is Josiah Liebert. I am a second-year Computer Science student at Oregon State University, participating in the URSA Engage program. I am from Portland, Oregon. I am interested in sustainability, learning, leadership, science, and sports. URSA stands for Undergraduate Research, Scholarships & the Arts. The goal of the URSA Engage program is to match first-year, second-year, and first-year transfer students with an OSU faculty for research in their field of interest. The program runs for 15 weeks and culminates in a Spring Showcase, where students show off the research that they have been working on. The time commitment is five hours weekly. 

My mentor is Victor Villegas. Through his job at OSU Extension Services, and through investing his own free time, he creates different curricula that encourage youth in underserved and underrepresented communities to pursue STEM and STEAM careers. I applied to the URSA Engage program because I felt that my values and skillset aligned well with the work that Victor is actively pursuing. I come from a background in youth advocacy through different experiences at organizations such as Chess for Success, Bike First, and TOPSoccer. These experiences made me realize that I enjoy the creative freedom that teachers can have in making lessons in addition to the joy that children bring to learning. Finding ways to make topics interesting and fun while also explaining ideas in a way that young students can understand is something that has been appealing to me for years. I saw that Victor had experience in the field of youth advocacy, and was looking to take on an undergrad for STEAM-based lesson building. At that point, I became interested in applying. 

Throughout this experience, I want to create something that will impact Oregon communities beneficially. It would be awesome to see a lesson that I create, actually be implemented successfully in some school or camp. STEAM has so many cool aspects that are not explored engagingly. They relate these subjects to negative connotations. Math is challenging or science is boring. Instead of going from a foundation of learning the ideas, and then doing some hands-on activity if we have the time, I want to create lessons that will integrate hands-on activities into learning foundational ideas. I would also love to learn from people already in these fields to learn whatever I can about teaching underserved communities STEAM, or any other topic that applies to my project.

Generally, in this experience, I will be creating STEAM-based lessons for elementary and middle school students in underserved populations. The idea of these lessons is that they are self-contained so that any teacher with the correct tools could teach the lesson to their class and that the lessons are fun, through hands-on learning. The first lesson that I will be working on will be utilizing a DataBot sensor. Be sure to keep an eye out for updates involving the specifics of the DataBot project, as well as any future projects! 

If you have any questions or want to contact me, my school email is liebertj@oregonstate.edu, and this is my LinkedIn. I look forward to sharing my progress with you!

Weekly Progress Update

My progress for this week was a bit all over the place. One thing that I spent a sizeable amount of time on is updating my LinkedIn profile. LinkedIn is a great resource for contacting people doing similar work that I am doing. My experience was very undescriptive and my about section was outdated. I spent some time explaining what I did in each of my work experiences and updating my about section to hopefully connect with more people who are interested in STEAM education. I also added a link to this blog.

Another thing that I did this week is research DataBot and Drone Blocks, to see what other educators have previously done with these pieces of equipment. There were many interesting projects, and they can range greatly in terms of how challenging they are to learn. Some interesting projects that I found were tracking a garden’s health, measuring height using a drone, measuring air quality, etc. The DataBot has a lot of different sensors which can all be used to track different important qualities of the Earth. The following picture found on their website will show all of the different sensors.

Overall, this looks to be a powerful science tool, that has a lot of different features for the price. I have not been able to actually use one yet, so I do not know what its strengths and limitations are in practice. There are a couple of thing that will need to be discussed between me and Victor surrounding audience and purpose. The specific questions are the following:

Who specifically is our audience? What grade, or age, are they? How much STEM experience do they have? Is there a specific demographic of student that I should be tailoring the lesson for?

What is the purpose of the lesson? Are there specific learning outcomes that the students should take away? Will this lesson have more of the goal to just give students a positive experience with STEM, or will there be a bigger outcome?

Two questions that I may focus on after our meeting is, What will the specific lesson look like? How will students’ demographics be reflected in this lesson?