For the second year in a row, Kevin Huang of the BRL has been helping with the UW Math Academy Summer Program. The Math Academy offers a free summer program to help Washington State high school students develop key math, engineering and problem solving skills. The program targets specifically underrepresented minorities. As part of the program, students participate in a three-day workshop, called a Focus Group. For this, Kevin has been a teacher and mentor in a small-scale design project focusing on basic information about haptics and haptic enabled systems. By the end of the program, the students receive a crash-course in the mechanisms by which humans sense touch, design an experiment to interrogate a person’s two-point threshold, and also learn to program a one degree-of-freedom haptic device. The students work to acquire key skills, such as experimental design, analysis, programming and teamwork skills necessary to succeed in engineering related fields. Read more about the UW Math Academy here. 
The Early Engineering Institute is a free program for residential 9th and 10th graders. The program engages these students in math and science related fields and helps prepare students for college and college applications. We hosted a short-term mini-research project involving basic programming and introduction to haptic enabled technologies. The students also had the opportunity to interact with haptic devices and demonstrations in the biorobotics lab.
This last Sunday evening, members of the UW BRL attended the IEEE Seattle Section’s 110th Anniversary Celebration event at the Seattle Pacific Center. Senator Maria Cantwell joined regional IEEE members to celebrate this impressive anniversary. Graduate student researchers Jeffrey Herron and Kevin Huang brought demos to the event to showcase ongoing research from the UW BioRobotics Lab.
