Learning in the classroom becomes learning in the community

In an unfamiliar classroom of new classmates, the elementary students are uncharacteristically quiet as their Complex Fluids Toys class begins. After a few chemical reactions, though, the new friends are bouncing with excitement just as much as the bouncy balls that Joanne Beckwith Maddock, Emerson Uhlig, and Carolina Colombo Tedesco taught them to make.

Beckwith Maddock, an assistant teaching professor, and Uhlig and Colombo Tedesco, both Ph.D. students, are a few of the volunteers from the Department of Chemical Engineering who lead outreach activities throughout the year. They want young people in Pittsburgh and beyond to know that engineering is for everyone.

In her outreach classes, Beckwith Maddock guides students to think about how chemical properties affect how we make products. "You can make slime and bouncy balls from the same ingredients," says Beckwith Maddock. "The end product depends on how you process the materials."

Some outreach programs bring Pittsburgh-area students to campus for workshops. Other times, Carnegie Mellon students and faculty visit local schools. Carnegie Mellon's Leonard Gelfand Center for Service Learning and Outreach and the College of Engineering partner with K-12 schools, out-of-school-time providers, and nonprofit organizations in Greater Pittsburgh. There are also projects that reach around the region and the world.

For Colombo Tedesco, outreach work is an exchange. "Not only are we providing them an experience, they are also providing us a lot of insight," she says. She has noticed that younger students will say the first thing that comes to mind. "They ask questions that we don't even stop to think about, and they're not easy to answer," says Colombo Tedesco. "It opens your mind."

Learning to explain higher-level STEM concepts to a young audience helped Teddi Bishop refine her ability to communicate with a wide range of audiences, including in industry. Bishop is one of the few undergraduate students to develop and teach her own class through the Gelfand Center. Most classes are taught by faculty and graduate students, with the support of undergraduate teaching assistants.

Bishop's Liquid Science class introduces K-2 students to chemistry. She spent a year developing the curriculum, with guidance from the Gelfand Center, before she started to teach it. Bishop has also taught introductory coding and robotics classes at the Gelfand Center. "It's been really fun to translate my chemical and biomedical engineering knowledge into terms for younger students," she says.

As outreach co-chair for the CMU section of the Society of Women Engineers (SWE), Alicia Chua organized events for middle and high school girls in Pittsburgh. She also served as an instructor for SWE++ (pronounced like C++), an eight-week coding camp. Chua, an undergraduate studying chemical engineering and biomedical engineering, taught Python and Scratch to middle school girls. Chua didn't have any exposure to coding until college. She hopes that introducing other women to these concepts early on will empower them to explore STEM fields.

When preparing to give a technical talk to high school students attending the Girls Advancing in STEM (GAINS) conference hosted by CMU last year, Colombo Tedesco was very thoughtful about how she presented her research. She uses artificial intelligence to simulate how molecules interact. "I didn't want them to get a takeaway message that what I do is very hard, and they cannot understand it," she says. "I wanted the message to be, 'I learned, and you can learn, too.'"

"Above all, we want kids to have fun with STEM. If they think it seems too daunting, they might never consider these fields as an option," says Bishop.

The National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE) is another CMU organization that hosts local middle and high school students on campus. Ethnan Pedro volunteered for their STEM Day activities and is also involved with outreach in Africa through the CMU chapter of Engineers Without Borders. He is on the project team working with a community in Zimbabwe to develop a solution so that the hospital can maintain refrigeration during spontaneous blackouts.

Pedro is applying the process mindset instilled in him by his chemical engineering courses. "Understanding how to design a process to achieve a goal is relevant everywhere," he says. "In this case, we're planning to make a generator and evaluating which type of energy to use."

"Chemical engineers are able to understand processes on many different levels, from an entire factory line all the way down to micron-sized droplets," says Uhlig.

Beckwith Maddock wants to make engineering career paths less hidden for young people, especially in areas that don't have deep university or industrial connections. At a rural Ohio elementary school in May, she guided a Math Olympiad group to make electric circuits from modeling clay and then to use math models to explain the phenomena they observed. Her goal is to show younger students how engineers bring science and math together.

She has visited high school and middle school science classes in the same rural district on two prior trips. In a chemistry class, Beckwith Maddock introduced students to the role of diffusion in drug delivery. In a biology class, she led an activity connected to DNA, RNA, and vaccine development. With middle school students, she made toothpaste to introduce them to concepts in formulations and consumer products.

The faculty and student volunteers involved in outreach share the belief that service is a vital part of academia. "A university is a place that produces knowledge and trains people to be valuable members of society," says Colombo Tedesco. "I'm grateful to be in a place of privilege, and outreach is a way to share a little of that with a broader community."

For media inquiries, please contact Lauren Smith at lsmith2@andrew.cmu.edu.