ManuFUNturing: A Lego-based Manufacturing Outreach Program
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This outreach program is geared towards exciting the next generation of manufacturing engineers in the United States. A major component of our outreach work is geared towards taking the micro/nano-scale manufacturing concepts and converting them into the language of Lego. These hands-on Lego modules are then presented to the middle and high-school students.
Lego-units Designed and Built to-date
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ASEE Conference Publications:
- Nowak, J.F., Brown, T.S., Dvorozniak, L.M., Graf, T.P., Herkenham, E.S., and Samuel, J.* ,2016, “A Biomanufacturing Outreach Module for Middle School Students Using Lego-based Destop factory Concepts” , Proceedings of the 2016 ASEE Annual Conference, New Orleans, Louisiana.
- Nowak. J., Kaczmarek, D., Herkenham, E., and Samuel, J.*, 2015, “Communicating Advanced Manufacturing Concepts to Middle-school Students Using Lego-machines”, Proceedings of the 2015 ASEE Annual Conference, Seattle.
- Almadovar, C., Day E., Liu, R., Mckibben, S., Silverman, D., and Samuel, J., 2013, “A Lego-based Outreach Module Aimed at Promoting Advanced Manufacturing Careers to K-12 Students in the United States”, Proceedings of the 2013 ASEE Annual Conference, Atlanta, Georgia.
Training Upstate New York Middle-School and High-School Teachers
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Given the interest that the Lego-based manuFUNturing modules have developed among the local middle school and high-school teachers, we have partnered with the RPI Engineering Ambassadors program to conduct training sessions for local teachers. The first work shop in this series was conducted on August 5th 2014 (pictures to the right). The materials from this workshop can be found at this link.
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Media Dissemination
Our research team has partnered with David DeWitt (1968 Rensselaer Alumnus), the CEO and founder of Phase65 Inc., a non-profit organization that promotes the cause of manufacturing and STEM education in the United States. This collaboration will allow for the wide-spread dissemination of our Lego-based modules as well as the NSF-funded micro-manufacturing education modules through their www.manufacturingstories.com portal.