By Tracey McSweeney, Seventh Grade Robotics Teacher
Aron Rubin, an engineer at Lockheed Martin, recently came to the seventh grade robotics class at Phifer Middle School for the latest in a series of visits to build student excitement for engineering and programming. Each lesson has been a more ambitious attempt to amaze and inspire the students.
Rubin worked closely with the students as they built their own circuit boards. Just like with any other project, Aron had collaborated with the stakeholders to design a project that was safe, while still providing all the excitement that comes along with manipulating molten metal.
Aron captivated students by waving a wand in the air like a magician and spelled a child’s name with light-emitting diodes, or LEDs for short. He explained to the students that they would be making their mystery message appear in the air by the end of class. Aron created a sample program that can display any message using the Arduino development environment, which can be used to program a number of general purpose microprocessors to read sensors, as well as to control things like motors and lights. Using Google Classroom, the sample program was distributed to each student, including instructions on how to make it display their own unique message. After another quick overview of circuits and how they are designed and fabricated, it was time to melt some metal.
The students broke up into stations led by Aron Rubin and several teachers from Phifer. It was truly a team effort to create the best possible learning experience for the students. The students were excited to finish the assembly of a circuit by soldering the last few joints under close help and supervision of each instructor. They were ecstatic to create their own working circuit board with LEDs that would later be attached to a student created wand. Students Duy Nguyen, Kai Ibarrondo, Vy Le, Arissa Fleming, and Leo Thach were extremely helpful in assisting with the download of 103 student message programs onto the circuit boards. They also were excellent peer tutors and assisted others when they were done their projects.
Once the LED circuit board was created and soldered, each student experimented with the wand to determine the speed the wand must move in order for their eyes to be able to see the message in the air. They also were to test different ways to move the wand and discover which method works best. For example, some students attached their circuit board to a ruler and spun it in a circle, while other students waved their LEGO created wand from side to side. The students found the word was more visible with the classroom lights out and when the wand was in front of a dark wall or surface.
This was a fantastic project, which allowed the students to feel empowered as they engineered their own LED wand. We cannot thank Aron Rubin from Lockheed Martin enough for volunteering his time and expertise to spark interest in engineering and technology for our seventh grade Pennsauken students. Also, we would like to thank teachers Brian Filachek and Tim Gilbride for assisting students in preparing the circuit boards.
For more information about Arduino, Lockheed Martin, or possible careers in engineering, visit http://www.lockheedmartin.com or http://www.arduino.cc.
