Category: Students

HOUGHTON — From purifying water to learning the reactions creating ice cream, Houghton Middle School seventh-graders got hands-on learning as part of the school’s annual Day of Science activity at Michigan Technological University.

About 120 students took in four stations out of 11 throughout the day, intended to engage them in various science, engineering, mathematics and technology (STEM) fields.

In Ed Laitila’s session, the materials science assistant professor taught students about the properties of matter and how it shifts between states.

“When we put that nitrogen in there, it’s going to transform into a gas and it needs energy,” he said. “It’s going to pull that energy out of the cream. And if you pull energy out of the cream, what happens to the temperature?”

Read more at the Mining Gazette, by Garrett Neese.

The Day of Science took place on September 18, 2019.

Michigan Technological University’s Material Science Summer Youth Program has a new industry partner in Lightweight Innovations For Tomorrow. LIFT is a Detroit-based research and development firm largely sponsored by the U.S. Department of defense. The firm is interested in designing lightweight materials but is also interested in education and outreach.

“There are a lot of manufacturing jobs that are unfilled,” said Joe Steel, Communications Director at LIFT. “… part of our efforts is to encourage students to look at engineering as a profession.”

“LIFT has new leadership and is working with more small and medium-sized companies. We at MTU are really well positioned to assist them in that because we have contacts with bigger companies as well but also with smaller and medium-sized companies,” said Paul Sanders, associate professor of science and engineering at MTU. “So, we started to partner more intentionally with them.”

“We have a group of students and take them through a whole bunch of activities that provide them with fun hands-on activities that incorporate a lot of science,” said Edward Laitila, Senior Research Engineer and Adjunct Assistant Professor at MTU. “We like to relate how things occur with something that they are familiar with.”

Read more at the Mining Gazette, by Jon Jaehnig.

Related:

LIFT Partners With Michigan Technological University To Support Students In Advanced Manufacturing

Two Michigan Tech undergraduates are among 229 students from 62 universities in 10 countries who have been named University Innovation Fellows (UIF). They are Robert Lambert and Josh Jay.

Run by Stanford University’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, the University Innovation Fellows program empowers students to become agents of change at their schools. Fellows work to ensure their peers gain the knowledge, skills and attitudes required to compete in the economy of the future and make a positive impact on the world.

Lambert is a second year management major. “I wanted to join UIF to have a more active part in the community, as well as to become an agent of change on Michigan Tech’s campus,” he said.

Jay is a second year student majoring in materials science and engineering. He is currently doing a co-op in Minneapolis. “I want to be a part of UIF because they aren’t just talking and thinking about creating change, but they are actually making it happen,” he said. “It is also a great community of people to help you figure out how to turn your ideas into reality.”

University Innovation Fellows advocate for lasting institutional change and create opportunities for students to engage with innovation, entrepreneurship, design thinking and creativity at their schools. Fellows design innovation spaces, start entrepreneurship organizations, host experiential learning events and work with faculty to develop new courses.

Since it began under the auspices of the National Science Foundation, the UIF program has trained more than 1,200 students.

Michigan Tech has had 14 University Innovation Fellows since the program started in 2014. They work as part of the Pavlis Honors College to promote entrepreneurship, innovation, design thinking and creativity. Among other projects, they developed the makerspace called The Alley in the former bowling alley in the basement of the Memorial Union Building.

“Stanford’s University Innovation Fellows program helps students develop the skills needed to be agents for positive change on their campus,” said Mary Raber, co-director of the Pavlis Honors College Innovation Center for Entrepreneurship. “After participating in an intensive six week online training program, our UIFs have been a force for helping to create a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship at Michigan Tech and have been instrumental in bringing many initiatives to life, like the orientation week’s #uifresh activity, the student-hosted Innovation Fest and the Alley Makerspace.”

By Jenn Donovan.

Michigan Tech beat out over 200 universities—including second-place Princeton—to win the Shapeways 3D Printing Campus Battle Grand Prize. Each student that participated receives the following:

• A $75 Shapeways 3-D print credit, which is particularly useful to students without access to a campus makerspace.
• A three-month trial of General Assembly’s Front Row Learning platform with unlimited access to both live and on-demand streaming classes across a number of topics in tech, business and design.
• A three-month Skillshare.com scholarship. Skillshare is an online learning community to master real-world skills through project-based classes.
• A Tinkercad T-shirt from Autodesk
• A Shapeways print

The physical prizes are en route and will be distributed by Professor Joshua Pearce (MSE/ECE).