Since my last post, I've been really busy. There was the BESS & IEEE (institute of electrical and electronics engineers) trip to the Museum of Science, and NSBE New England Zone Fall Zone Conference at WPI. Then since last Thursday: meeting the new Gordon-CenSSIS Scholars, Open House in the African American Institute, Women in Engineering day with prospective students, NU Service Day, BESS Corporate Series, TORCH, an intense Student Activities Fee Manual Review meeting, the Gordon CenSSIS Research and Industrial Collaboration Conference (RICC), Ribbon Cutting on the new ALERT Homeland Security Center of Excellence, the opening of a photo essay on a woman's experience with breast cancer where I spoke about my co-op, the BESS meeting about resumes. To top it all off after the meeting this evening BESS all went down to AfterHOURS for Soulful Expressions hosted by Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority and Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, a live jazz band with spoken word and hip-hop performances and lessons about the history of jazz by prof. Leonard Brown

Obviously this was far too many great things to write about, and all of that would be far too long, but if any of those other things are of interest to you or anything else, just ask.

Last Friday was Women in Engineering Day for prospective students, I sat on the student panel with 9 other female engineering student, from all different years from freshmen to 1st year masters candidate. We answered questions for girls & their parents about engineering, Northeastern, and being one of few females in our classes. After the panel we joined the prospective students and their families for lunch where we were available to answer any additional questions they had for us.

This week Wednesday and Thursday was the Gordon-CenSSIS RICC and celebration of the new ALERT center of Excellence. We saw technical talks and then a poster session on Wednesday. At the poster session since I didn't have a poster, I got to see what work other students in the center are doing. It's so interesting to see all of the different applications of such similar work. The main idea of CenSSIS is diverse problems, similar solutions and the student poster session is one of the most clear examples of exactly how true it is. Wednesday they also had a few speakers from the Department of Homeland Security about how the ALERT center will fit into their plan.
Thursday the Dean of the College of Engineering and the President of the University spoke on the center opening and preceded the Undersecretary of Homeland Security. Then out in the cold, they cut the ribbon on the center. ALERT is a Homeland Security Center of Excellence focusing on Awareness and Localization of Explosives Related Threats, co-lead by NU and URI with many other university and industry partners. Since CenSSIS is in year 9 of 10 years of NSF support, they pursued this grant last year and won, some of the CenSSIS work translates directly, and many faculty and students are related to both.
Because of the ALERT opening, the RICC was full of people from Homeland Security. At lunch, while waiting in line I ended up talking with the Explosives Research Program Manager from Homeland Security about where I was in school and some of my work. He ended up going back and talking about me to other people in the center.

Posted by Sarah Brown at 11:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

One of my favorite things about Northeastern is the location. We can walk to the Prudential Center easily. When the Red Sox won last year, even though they were away, campus basically emptied right to Fenway to go celebrate. We have two T stops, right on campus, and the Museum of Fine Arts is just steps away from campus. Our campus is seamlessly integrated into the city of Boston, which makes for the perfect opportunity for students to give back to the surrounding communities.

Last week BESS started a new community service program, our TORCH Program. TORCH (Technical OutReach Community Help) is a program from the National Society of Black Engineers, which BESS is a chapter of (http://www.nsbe.neu.edu/about.html - about the 2 names). TORCH is NSBE's solution to the digital divide and the primary national level community service initiative.

Here at Northeastern, BESS has partnered with the Public Internet Center at Madison Park Village, which is right across the street from campus, to offer two computer classes once a week. Every Tuesday we teach basic computer skills to adults, and computer programming to kids.

This week the adult's topic was the Internet. We taught the basic skills necessary to navigate the internet in an interactive format to make sure that each student completely understood. Next week we'll start Office, with Word, then Excel, PowerPoint and one week on Resume Writing.

Here's me explaining how to use the search assistant in Internet Explorer to one of this week's students. The lighting was kinda bad, but the photographer didn't want to distract anyone with the flash so it' pretty blurry.

Here's another one of our members with another student, showing her how to add a website to the favorites list.

We're teaching the kids to program using an environment called Alice(alice.org). It allows them to build 3D worlds and teaches the concept of object oriented design. We're starting with good general programming practices, like planning out your program before beginning. This week they practiced building storyboards and then built their worlds based on what they planned out. This way we can hopefully get the kids interested in programming at a young age and give them the tools they need to understand using standard programming languages without getting caught up in missing semicolons.

So far this has been a great experience. We planned this program from the start. We took the guidelines from NSBE of creating a community technology center and teaching members of the community fundamental computer skills, but beyond that it was all us. We had to chose curriculum, coordinate with the center, customize the curriculum every week, prepare presentations and teach the material. Through honor society & different groups throughout middle school and high school I did a lot of different community service projects, but when you're actually involved from the start, the planning & preparation, through the execution it makes the experience that much more rewarding.

We also came upon some unexpected challenges. Last week as we taught, the students were clarifying the instruction we gave among each other in Spanish. Fortunately, the curriculum we chose, a free one from Microsoft, had all the instructional manuals available in multiple languages, including Spanish. This week we were able to provide them with the handouts in Spanish. Plus as an added bonus now I have a way to refresh the 5 years of Spanish I took, but have gotten a little rusty on since coming to NU.

In the kids room, the kids that showed up and were interested were younger than what we had expected or prepared for, but we just had to adjust last week on the spot and plan in future weeks that we have kids 8-12 years old instead of 13-18 years old. It makes it a bit more challenging for us as we use a text book designed for an introductory college level or high level high school course to prepare, but it's all a part of the learning experience for us.

-- Remember you can always ask questions about anything here! Just post a comment, they'll all go straight to me first so if you'd rather just ask me that's fine too.

Posted by Sarah Brown at 9:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)