RESEARCH EXPERIENCE FOR TEACHERS (RET)
www.coe.drexel.edu/ret
This program placed local high school teachers in Drexel labs to help acquaint them with research environments and provide them with skills and experiences they could bring back to the classroom. We were visited by Barbara Rose, a math teacher at the Franklin Towne Charter School, and Steve Rood-Ojalvo, a computer science teacher from Steinert High School.
The effort was coordinated by myself and Bill Green. After familiarizing Barbara and Steve with our lab and research goals, we set them to the task of measuring the bouyancy of our blimp. This provided them with a very usable and portable research experience while also gathering much needed data to characterize the blimp. After they completed the experiment, we then asked that they construct a webpage to document their results. These can be found on their webpages linked below.
We then assigned them tasks that were more catered towards their individual interests. I worked closely with Barbara while Bill guided Steve. Barbara was a former programmer, but was unfamiliar with the latest programming languages. I assembled a lesson plan to teach her Visual Basic. She completed much of the work independently, and I met with her daily to review.
Steve was heavily interested in advanced programming. Being an adept C++ programmer, we thought it best to challenge him by introducing him to a new language. Bill worked with Steve on accomplishing distance measurements using stereo vision through Matlab. Both Barbara and Steve documented their experiences in the webpages linked below:
Barbara Rose
Steve Rood-Ojalvo