A Publication of the
Minnesota Space Grant Consortium
Dept. of Aerospace Engineering and Mechanics
University of Minnesota
107 Akerman Hall
110 Union Street SE
Minneapolis, MN 55455
(612) 626-9295
fax (612) 626-1558
https://www.mnspacegrant.org/

Winter 2001

Advanced STEPS for Girls Launches Rocket Program

They were given a protractor, a stopwatch, a bicycle, 12 feet of flexible measuring tape, a playing card, a roll of tape and a piece of string.

“How do you measure the height (maximum altitude) of the rocket with these simple tools?” asked Caroline Hayes, professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Minnesota, one of five faculty members for the week-long, tuition-free Science Technology and Engineering Preview Summer Camp for Girls (STEPS).

Advanced STEPS Faculty and Students with rocket, Summer 2000

The 30 high school girls from across the region broke into the four groups they’d been in all week - Voyager, Discovery, Apollo and Gemini. Each team had a separate task - one to time the rocket’s flight with the stopwatch, the second using the protractor to measure the angle of the rocket’s highest point from the ground, the third to determine the distance from measurement site to launch site using the bicycle’s wheel as a measuring stick, and the fourth to use trigonometry and physics to calculate the answer.

Wearing lime-green T-shirts with the words “Actually, I am a rocket scientist!” on the back, the girls scurried across the grounds of the airport in Stanton, Minn., on Thursday morning to fulfill their MacGyver-like mission.

Throughout the week, the girls had assembled two rockets and the circuitry for the altimeter, camera and temperature gauge placed in the rockets’ nose cones. With the help of Ky Michaelson, a pyrotechnician who builds and launches rockets for feature films, the girls blasted the 6-foot-tall missile 2,160 feet high, according to their measurements. They will use the data gathered from the rocket’s nose to analyze the flight trajectory and compare it to their predictions and calculations from the field.

Women Wanted

STEPS is a response to the dearth of women engineering the field of engineering. The program, in its first year in Minnesota, is a pilot for similar camps expected to be established in 11 other states in the next few years.

“I find this science much more interesting now,” she said at the rocket launch. “I love this stuff because it is real life, not like math problems that they just make up. We get to apply here what we learned in school.

“Now I’m seeing that trigonometry last year was worth it,” she added.

While there is an equitable ratio of men and women in the biological sciences, the field of engineering still has a large gender gap, said Susan Marino, one of the camp’s directors. Nationwide, only about 20 percent of engineers are women - of that group, only about half are actually working in the industry.

“We really haven’t gotten anywhere in getting women in engineering in the past 15 years,” Marino said. “This program is a part of the first statewide outreach to get girls in engineering. The idea is to take a coordinated, systematic approach in which we will track the girls to see if the outreach really works.”

Overcoming Obstacles

STEPS - a partnership that includes the “U,” the Bush Foundation, the Society of Manufacturing Engineers, NASA and Medtronic Inc. - has a simple application process that emphasizes a participant’s interest over academic standing.

“A lot of kids, and girls especially, think that engineers have to be math geniuses,” Marino said. “You don’t have to be an A student to be an engineer.”

Another obstacle is the simple fact that many girls don’t know what engineers do: “Boys are constantly taking things apart and seeing how things work - that’s engineering,” said Marino. “But if you don’t start at that level - and girls often don’t - you never really get what it is all about.”

Most of the girls did not leave the camp confident they would become engineers: “I’m waiting to try everything before I put my foot down and decide what I want to do,” Koenen said.

But that’s OK, as far as Marino’s concerned. “It’s not that I hope they all become engineers,” she said, “but that they leave thinking it is a possibility.”

~ Article excerpted with permission from the Star Tribune

Study Buddies

Experimental Study Group helps engineering students succeed in a historically challenging class

Before the university’s next generation of engineering alumni can start designing tomorrow’s automobiles, aircraft, buildings, and bridges, they must get past a formidable hurdle: Aerospace Engineering and Mechanics 3031.

A considerable challenge, AEM 3031- Deformable Body Mechanics - is one of the first courses that aerospace, civil, and mechanical engineering students take as a part of their major sequence. Here, they grapple with the fundamentals of torsion and the bending of beams - the nuts and bolts of designing aircraft, buildings, or cars.

When Beth Nollenberger, a senior aerospace engineering major, took the course last fall, she encountered a problem that also plagued many of her classmates. Because she didn't know many people in her class, she had no ready-made study group of friends who could tackle the complex calculus and physics homework together.

The following spring semester, when Nollenberger heard about Experimental Study Group (ESG) sessions, she knew she had to get involved.

Open to any AEM 3031 student who wants extra help, ESG sessions are peer-run, voluntary study groups that meet eight times a week throughout the entire semester. Student instructors - graduates of the course who earned a grade higher than 3.0 - lead the group sessions devoted to homework problems. The student instructors maintain contact with the course’s teaching assistants.

"It's supposed to be a roundtable discussion, but for engineers, we had to tweak it a little bit," says Randi Quanbeck, associate program director for the Minnesota Space Grant Consortium (MnSGC), which organizes the sessions. "[ESG] helps them recycle and reuse and engage in the content more thoroughly."

Because participation in the sessions is voluntary and anonymous, it doesn’t influence how the professor and teaching assistants assign grades.

“We don’t want it skewing how the professor grades,” Quanbeck says. The student instructors are not involved in the grading process.

The study sessions definitely help students, says graduate student Wayne Falk, who was a teaching assistant for the course last year. Although he couldn’t track the impact of ESG attendance on an individual student’s performance, Falk says that the class as a whole achieved a higher success rate in its homework assignments. In previous years, 20 to 30 percent of students solved the homework problems correctly, he says, but last year 80 to 90 percent were getting the right answers or at least had the right idea.

“Some of the homework problems tended to be long, so if students made a small mistake somewhere in the answer, they wouldn’t know it,” says Falk. “That mistake would be carried through the whole solution, and it would be a complete mess. Having people to check their work against was the best way of finding errors and learning better ways to solve problems.”

Nollenberger, who ended up doing well in the class despite her struggles, led ESG seasons twice a week during spring semester. “I think it’s a great program to get into. The TAs were able to see a difference from [fall] semester,” she says.

The sessions attract anywhere from five to 25 students, depending on when homework is due or when a test is scheduled, says Randy Anderson, former ESG student instructor and mechanical engineering graduate. In a typical session, he explains, students will choose a couple of homework problems, and then the student instructor would dissect the problems step-by-step on the blackboard.

“I wrote what they told me to do, and I tried to lead them the right way,” he says.

For students, this blend of instruction and teamwork is what has made the ESG sessions so successful.

“It’s great because one person may know one step but not know the next, and someone else who didn’t know the first step may know the next,” Nollenberger says.

The student instructors, who are paid for their work, are each responsible for two 50-minute sessions per week. Ideally they would also attend class, Quanbeck says, although she hasn’t made their attendance mandatory.

Anderson, who received an “A” in the course in spring 1998, had no trouble finding other people to study with back then because he knew lots of engineering majors. However, as an ESG instructor, he saw firsthand how the group sessions benefit students who might be having a difficult time understanding a concept of solving a problem.

“Students who are having trouble get to see another method of [solving] a problem."
The program also eases the burden on the course’s teaching assistants. Because there are more than 100 students in the class, Quanbeck says, it’s impossible for two assistants to answer all of the student’s questions. Students appreciate the opportunity for more personalized attention and “feel the department is doing something extra for them,” she says.

The ESG concept is based on Supplemental Instruction, a program begun in the early 1970s at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. The Missouri program gave students in historically difficult courses the opportunity to meet and work in small groups, where they gained confidence in their ability to understand key concepts and to devise strategies to master the course content, says Quanbeck.

For information on the University of Missouri-Kansas City program see website at: https://www.umkc.edu/index.html. More information on the AEM program is available from the MnSGC Office at (612) 626-9295 or website: https://www.mnspacegrant.org/.

~ Article excerpted with permission from Inventing Tomorrow, magazine of U of MN Institute of Technology, Fall 2000.

Content & Communication Mathematics Institute for Paraprofessionals Held at Augsburg College

The first C & C Institute for paraprofessionals was held in June on the campus of Augsburg College. Dr. Randi Quanbeck and Dr. Jeanine Gregoire coordinated this new program through funding made possible by Eisenhower Professional Development grant funding. The Institute targeted adult professionals already assisting learners with mathematics curriculum in grades K-6. 20 educational assistants participated in this program offered free of charge for college credit.

The C & C Institute was designed as a two-part project: content and communication. The content section of the Institute consisted of a mathematics course taught by Dr. Larry Copes (Augsburg college) for three weeks in June using innovative techniques for problem solving as well as the SciMath curriculum for mathematics educators. The communication portion of the institute was coordinated by Dr. Quanbeck and featured guest speakers who had tackled a mathematics career as older adults. It also featured communication techniques for working with students, teachers, and administrators.

Additional funding for expanding C & C Institute next year is being sought from NSF by Dr. Gail Nordmoe, Director of the Richard Green Institute and the official evaluator for the program.

Director’s Note

We are ending the second year of our upgraded status as a Designated State Consortium. This has resulted in almost doubling our funds and has allowed us to expand our activities in significant ways. We have increased our support of graduate research by providing scholarships for Ph.D. students in Space Physics, Astronomy, Geo-Physics, and Aerospace Engineering at the University of Minnesota. We are also supporting two masters students at Bemidji State University and have doubled our Consortium Wide Fellowship Program for undergraduates as well as increasing the scholarship programs at our Affiliates. We were able to add a new Affiliate, Southwest State University, in Marshall, Minnesota. This gives MnSGC a presence in the southwestern part of the state. Two undergraduate students are working on experiments to be flown as a part of NASA Reduced Gravity Program. The students are studying material damping and droplet formation under reduced gravity. We had a most successful Undergraduate Student Research Symposium and have expanded undergraduate research opportunities at many affiliates. In addition we have added several new K-12 and outreach activities. The expanded Enhancement Grant Program will allow us to provide seed money for a variety of projects and already we are supporting two new initiatives in Geo-Spatial Information Systems at the University of Minnesota and Southwest State, a program in astro-biology at Bemidji State, and an Experimental Study Group Program at the University of Minnesota. All in all we had a very successful two years and look forward to further expansion of our programs.

Eric Euteneuer: Report from Abroad

In the Spring of 2000, I crossed the Atlantic to work at one of the largest and most prestigious divisions of the automotive industry, Mercedes-Bens, part of the DaimlerChrysler Corporation. My experience at DaimlerChrysler in Stuttgart, Germany was not only one of the most valuable experiences I have had in my collegiate career, but also a life experience I will never forget. There I worked in a group that was working on prototype traction motors being built for electric and hybrid automobile applications. These traction motors had to be connected to the electronics of the motor through something called a connector ring. These two pieces are then welded together to form the complete motor. The way to connect these two pieces was by an ultrasonic welding process in which the two pieces are rubbed together under great pressure at an ultrasonic frequency such that the two pieces become one. My job was to develop a test section of this connecting ring in order to test this welding process and help determine if this was a feasible process for mass production. This, along with other small tasks, allowed me to get valuable hands on experience in a highly developing field as well as priceless international experiences that is becoming so important in a worldwide marketplace.

In addition to working, this internship allowed me the chance to travel within Germany and learn a new culture. This experience allowed me to see such cities as Berlin, Munchen, and Hamburg, visit such diverse landscapes like those found in the Alps, the Schwarzwald (Black Forest), and the Bodensee, and allowed me to become friends with people from all over the world. This is a collegiate and life experience I would highly recommend to anyone! (This internship was made possible through the Minnesota Space Grant Office and the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Mechanics).

Junior Ryan Cobian wins Goldwater Scholarship

MnSCG scholarship winner and a junior physics and mathematics major, Ryan Cobian was one of 309 undergraduate students nationwide in the field of mathematics, science and engineering to win a prestigious Goldwater scholarship for the 2000 - 2001 academic year. The $7,500 scholarship will cover the cost of tuition, fees, books, and room and board. A student at Augsburg College, Cobian has participated in two international space physics conferences, making an oral presentation at one and a poster presentation at another. In addiction, he is the second author of an academic paper published this summer in the Journal of Geophysical Research. Cobian is the fourth Augsburg Goldwater scholar in the last five years and is on of 13 recipients from Minnesota colleges and universities. The scholarship winners are selected by the Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Foundations from among 1,100 nominees by college and university faculties. Goldwater scholarships are the premier undergraduate awards of their kinds in these fields.

Carleton Student Receives Rhodes

Carl Tape, a senior in physics and geology at Carleton College, Norhtfield, MN, received a 2001 Rhodes Scholarship Award announced in December, 2000. Carl was the recipient of an MnSGC scholarship award last year. The Rhodes selection was based on academic achievement, personal integrity, leadership potential, and physical vigor, among other criteria. Carl plans to go to graduate school and has already published one paper listed in this issue.

Table of Contents

Women Wanted

Overcoming Obstacles

Experimental Study Group helps engineering students succeed in a historically challenging class