Daily Tribune coverage of the STEMx research partnership with Oakland University

http://www.dailytribune.com/social-affairs/20140416/birmingham-high-school-students-learn-engineering-concepts-at-oakland-university

Birmingham high school students learn engineering concepts at Oakland University

Jack Moore, a junior at Birmingham Seaholm High School, works with ergonomics software at Oakland University’s School of Engineering, Wednesday April 16, 2014. Seaholm had a group of 10-12 STEMx students to Oakland University to participate in a hands-on lab as part of the community engagement program for Oakland University School of Engineering. They worked with a software program called “Jack,” a human modeling simulation software. With it, the students can create a computer simulation of a job, then see how long it takes and the amount of force is in each joint of the human body for a specific height and weight person. They analyze the work and then are able to redesign the job to be more efficient and safer for the employee. (Vaughn Gurganian-The Oakland Press)

By Megan Semeraz, Megan.Semeraz@oakpress.com, @MeganSemeraz on Twitter

Posted: 04/16/14, 3:42 PM EDT | Updated: 3 days ago

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Students from Birmingham Seaholm High School work with ergonomics software at Oakland University’s School of Engineering, Wednesday April 16, 2014. Seaholm had a group of 10-12 STEMx students to Oakland University to participate in a hands-on lab as part of the community engagement program for Oakland University School of Engineering. They worked with a software program called “Jack,” a human modeling simulation software. With it, the students can create a computer simulation of a job, then see how long it takes and the amount of force is in each joint of the human body for a specific height and weight person. They analyze the work and then are able to redesign the job to be more efficient and safer for the employee. (Vaughn Gurganian-The Oakland Press)

Some Birmingham high school students are getting the chance to do hands-on engineering work in a new partnership with Oakland University.
Juniors and seniors from Groves and Seaholm High, part of a new STEMx research and design course, worked on a software program called “Jack,” in an Oakland University lab. The program was just kicked off this month.
“I developed this lab (that the students did),” said graduate student John Katnoa. “Right now, they’re building. It’s called ergonomic human modeling simulation. It basically looks like “The Sims.” It’s just people and you have them do jobs and you can look at the forces in each part of the job, so you can make sure a job is safe.”
The program includes students visiting other professors at OU so they can get a taste of what real research and methods are all about.
“They’re small groups of students that come here to collect and analyze authentic data about professionals in the STEM fields,” said program coordinator Doug Baltz. “What John and Dr. Van Til (chair of OU’s Department of Industrial & Systems Engineering) have offered is a conduit between what they do and the student’s research.”
Baltz said Amy Butler at the OU Incubator set the partnership up, which has been a success so far.
Van Til said: “Birmingham contacted us through the OU Incubator ... They basically wanted their STEM class to meet here for some mentoring opportunities.”
Baltz said there are already three sections of students signed up for the STEMx class next year.
“It’s been a big hit,” Baltz said.

Blended Externship with Dr. Amy Banes-Berceli from Oakland University

OU Externship

I observed one of Dr. Amy Banes-Berceli undergraduate students remove the outliers within the data points.  Before attending I did not realize how tedious the research process was. I learned the data received must be analyzed everyday. The data collected for one day had over 6,000 data points that measured the blood pressure of diabetic and normal rats. The points that were removed were deleted because; they made the data appear inconsistent and unrealistic. Each point that is deleted must be justified so that it does not appear that the data is being skewed.  In the myograph experiment in which hypertension between male and female rats was compared the data seemed to express that male rats show signs of hypertension at a much faster rate than female rats.  The rats that were tested had invasive surgery, so catheters could be placed inside the rats and the saline and angiotensin could be injected.  Unfortunately, the catheter was placed to tightly inside the aortic wall and resulted in poor tracing points. The angiotensin,which is a substrate that causes hypertension, was injected as well. The sodium had to be autoclaved for sterility. The controls in the project are rats that did not receive the angiotensin and the saline but the still receive the invasive procedure.

The data that is received from the rats is graphed so the rats can be compared. Dr.Banes-Berceli explained to me that use western blotting to determine which proteins are involved in expressing hypertension. The blood pressure from the normal rats in compared to the blood pressure of the diabetic rats. The graphs indicated that diabetic rats express the proteins involved at a much faster rate than the normal rats. Dr. Banes-Berceli is trying to determine why those proteins are expressed, in which she and her team will be able to develop a drug that will be able to prevent those proteins from turning on and hopefully get the drug on the market.

Aria Williams

Johanna visit to Washington DC

Johanna is an exchange student from Muenster, Germany. She documented her visit to Washington D.C.

The Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC

A remarkable experience.

10am the Holocaust Memorial Museum (HMM) opens it doors and a good hundreds people get in. The tour starts of with a little booklet we get at the entrance. It includes the identity of a German citizen during the holocaust that was Jewish and affected by the genocide in Germany. The first  object in the Museum was big poster of hundreds of corpses over each other. Some longer dead than others. On the third floor of the museum they tell the story of how Hitler gained power and how he slowly convinced the German nation that Jewish citizens and the communists are responsible for the Hyperinflation in germany and that they are distinctive for the German race.

They show the war aspect of the war and how fast Germany took countries over and gained more and more power. On the second floor they show little films and interviews with people who survived the concentration camps. At this point I started to feel very bad and guilty with what my country has done. It makes me think about how many potential artists and scientist etc Nazi/Germany killed.  In the middle of the room is a big white metal board. It lists all the German people who saved Jewish citizens from the genocide. It is a very long list and it is really impressive that many people resisted to get influenced by the propaganda. The second floor ends with a room that is completely stone and glass framed and when you sit down you can listen to reports from camp survivors and it is very touching and something everyone should see/hear in their lifetime.

The last floor has a room full of shoes that belong to all the camp inhabitants and you can smell the panic and fear in that room. The following room shows one of the crematoriums that were used in the camps to burn the corpses. In the rooms after you can watch little films the Americans/Britons and the UDSSR Armee took when they took over Nazi-Germany. Those pictures are disturbing and depressing. You see how hundreds of corpses are just thrown into a big hole and you can see how heartless and reckless many nazis were. The tour ends with a movie about many children who survived the camps and then moved to the US.

Overall it was an experience I'll never forget and that had a big impact on me. One thing I learned in my Psychology class at Seaholm and that helps me understand the whole Propaganda thing is that people are easier willing to do something that is abnormal and not human or in any way ethical right when someone is giving them commands. When you look at the Milgram Experiment, done in in 1961 by Stanley Milgram, you can see that even the nicest person is willing to do something unethical when they get commands. Obeying is easier than standing up against someone and maybe losing something because of it. This experiment is the system Hitler used just in small. He made the people feel like they had no other choice than obeying and that even when its wrong they can blame him because they were just obeying. But at the end we are all responsible for our actions. Doesn't matter if we are just following directions or if it was our own idea.

Stemx Research class in the news- Oakland University

Wednesday, April 09, 2014 - STEMx Collaboration Kicks Off at OU INC 

On Thursday, April 3, OU INC hosted the kickoff meeting of the STEMx course – a collaboration between Oakland University and Birmingham Seaholm High School. High school juniors and seniors gathered at the incubator to meet their new mentors from the university and community in a program introducing them to research and data development in STEM – science, technology, engineering , and mathematics. Faculty, staff and businesses serve as mentors for “data experiences” for the students.

“The STEMx Research and Design course is a unique academic conduit between high school students and professionals in the STEM related fields,” says STEMx coordinator for Birmingham Public Schools and Course Instructor Doug Baltz. “This experience embeds authentic data collections/analysis with a number of mentors from the surrounding community. Each mentor provides their own "invitation to connect" to real world applications.”

Representatives from the School of Engineering and Computer Science (SECS) and the College of Arts and Sciences encouraged these students to make their ideas heard and conduct research as soon as possible. Associate Dean of the School of Engineering and Computer Science Lorenzo Smith spoke of making good choices.

“Choose to get involved,” Smith said. “Make the right choice by putting your best effort into the work that you do.”

Bob Kittle, President and CEO of OU INC client Munetrix is also part of the mentor team. He emphasized not only the creation of data, but taking the next steps to understand and apply it – something that Munetrix does every day with their municipal economic forecasting tools.

Gary Rogers, Director of research at SECS, also encouraged involvement as soon as possible, saying that knowledge is gained through time and effort. “How you get there and the data you use to gauge the findings comes with experience,” said Rogers.

This collaborative program between Oakland and Seaholm will go for the rest of the school year, and is the first of this kind of program at the high school level and in collaboration with the university.

Seaholm High School visit from Wayne State Dr. Hummer from Steve

Our roads are arguably one of our most impressive pieces of infrastructure developed from American ingenuity. Like all infrastructure it needs to be ever changing to meet the needs of an expanding population with expanding needs. It is our nation’s civil engineers who design, construct and maintain our infrastructure that we seem to take for granted every day.

This past Friday my fellow STEMx classmates and I were able to sit in on a lecture from Dr. Joseph Hummer, professor and chair for civil and environmental engineering at Wayne State’s College of Engineering, who is world renowned for his work with traffic data. Dr. Hummer spoke about how civil engineers work with data collected in the field to calculate whether or not our roads are running as efficiently as they should. From that data they can make cost-effective proposals to various institutions to further improve our infrastructure.

Dr. Hummer has generously offered to simulate what these data experiences are like to STEMx students. In the near future myself, along with my STEMx classmates will be taken into the field to collect authentic traffic data as we learn how engineers check the efficiency of intersections. From there we will be analyzing this data and determining cost-effective solutions that can be proposed to various institutions.

I feel as though I can speak for my fellow classmates and instructor when I say that this upcoming data externship will prove to be very exciting and that we cannot wait to learn more about traffic data and engineering in general from Dr. Hummer.

-Steven Graczyk-  Birmingham Public Schools 2014.

Seaholm High School STEMx Kickoff Event at OU blog from Russell

Great blog from an exciting event. Mr. Baltz class in partnership with Oakland University.

STEMx Kickoff Event at OU INC

Seaholm’s pilot section of STEMx Research and Design organized by Seaholm AP Physics Teacher and OU Professor Doug Baltz really kicked things off last Thursday. The entire class went on a trip to OU INC, Oakland University’s business accelerator that helps young ventures in the areas of energy, medical devices, and information technology. We were greeted by Amy Butler, the Executive Director at OU INC, who has built a career in the area of energy efficiency.

We heard from a variety of speakers, all prominent members of the OU community and greater area. Lorenzo Smith, the Associate Dean at the School of Engineering and Computer Science, gave a nice motivational talk that emphasized the novelty of the STEMx program.

He was followed by Bob Kittle, the CEO of Munetrix. Mr. Kittle explained how Munetrix collects public sector financial data and generates easy to understand results through aggregate analysis. This serves to increase transparency in public sector finances and helps communities to increase their cost efficiency. My fellow STEMx student Olivia Miller is looking forward to working with him in the coming weeks.

Gary Rogers, OU Director of Research, also gave a brief introduction and conveyed his enthusiasm for being a part of this project.

Finally we heard from Robert VanTil, Chair of the Department of Industrial Systems Engineering, and John Katona, an ISE graduate student. VanTil and Katona are working on an ongoing project at Troy Beaumont Hospital. For his thesis, Katona is analyzing the patient and staff workflows of the hospital in the hope of making things more efficient and reducing wait times. A number of my STEMx classmates will be assisting him in his endeavor.

After the presentations, mentor pairings were announced for each of the STEMx students. So many professors in the OU community were interested in participating in this program that a two to one student to mentor ratio was achieved. My fellow STEMx student Labina Petrovska and I were thrilled to be matched up with OU Professor Mi Hye Song. Professor Song’s research focuses on the centrosome, a cellular organelle that plays a key role in organizing genetic material during cell division. Having successfully completed Linda Wichers’s Honors and AP Biology courses at Seaholm High School, Labina and I couldn’t be more excited to apply our knowledge in a real undergraduate research laboratory.

Russell Ladd

Student externship visit to Waveform Technology LLC

For my first STEMx externship I visited Waveform Technology LLC a telecommunications company that provides broadband services. We met with Bill Wichers, an electrical engineer, who talked about the hardware and technology involved in their operation, fiber optics, and how data is sent through the internet. Going into the externship I had very little preexisting knowledge on the subject and had no idea what to expect. My understanding of the internet and how data is sent was very basic, however by the end of the visit I feel I developed a base of knowledge on the concepts we learned about.

The area that interested me most was Bill's discussion of fiber optics. We had covered the basics of fiber optics in Doug Baltz's honors physics class so I had an understanding of the basic concepts of how they worked but little understanding of how the physics was applied in the real world. Bill showed us how they used the physics and engineering learned in school to solve real world problems to provide a dependable and high performing data transfer system.

 The most interesting part of fiber optics to me was the concept of splitting white light into many different wave lengths using filters, then recombining it to send multiple streams of data through one beam of light. This technology allows far more data to be sent through the existing fiber optics system. After the question and answer session Bill led us through a tour of their facilities. We got to see the servers they hosted, the air conditioning units, the power transformers, back up generator, warehouse and many other areas. Bill gave us a run down of what he has to do to keep everything operational and how he applies engineering almost all the time.

 He was extremely knowledgeable on a wide range of areas involved in running the data center. Overall the trip was a very interesting look into a STEM career and I was able to learn a lot about the engineering and physics behind telecommunications and gain some real world experience and knowledge.

Tom McLeod

Detroit ventures workshop may 3-4

See mr. C to sign up.

Seaholm student's visit the to Holocaust Memorial Center

4th hour Blended WWII Rachel visited the Holocaust Memorial Center in Farmington Hills, Michigan. She documented her experience.

This weekend, I went to visit the Holocaust Museum in Farmington Hills. As someone with an interest in the causes and atrocities of the Holocaust, I wasn’t sure what to expect from the museum. I am well versed in the facts and have heard many personal stories from survivors. Honestly, I did not really believe that the museum would have much information to offer me that I wasn’t already aware of. But from the moment I set foot in the door, I was completely proven wrong.

When you enter the museum, there is a large display about the history of the Jewish people. This was so interesting to add to the museum because it allows visitors to notice the recurring pattern of persecution of members of the Jewish faith. This laid a strong foundation for the exhibit about the causes of the holocaust, and the “scapegoating” of the Jews that occurred by Hitler and the Nazis. Although most people know that Hitler blamed the Jews for Germany’s problems, it was so powerful to see that the Jewish people have constantly been held accountable throughout history for problems that they could not possibly be culpable for.

The next part of the museum was an exhibit about the lives of the Jews before the holocaust. Seeing pictures of their communities and families made it so much more heartbreaking that they were subjected to such cruelty. People living and working, contributing to communities, and going about their every day business brought the history lesson to life. As much as I enjoyed the first few exhibits at the Holocaust Museum, by far the most powerful for me was the display about the horrible conditions and deaths that took place in concentration camps during the Holocaust. The videos and images that the museum curators had chosen highlighted both the intolerable cruelty of the Nazis and the indifference of the rest of the world to stop the mass genocide. News articles were laid out side by side about gas chambers and about the United Nation’s decision not to intervene. For the Jews being gassed, starved, and tortured to death, this indecision by major world powers was fatal.

The sheer horror of the Holocaust, however, really hit me personally when I was standing alone in the railroad car that they have at the museum. This car was extremely small, but up to 70 people would be crammed into it when they were taken from their homes and brought to concentration camps. They were often held in the cars for days or weeks, frequently contracting terrible illnesses or starving to death. As I stood in the car, I began to wonder how many people had been torn from their lives and their families and ended up standing in the same place on its floor that I was.

 As a Jew, I come from a family that was greatly affected by the Holocaust. The Geutman and Neustampel families, or my great grandmother’s parents’ families, were all killed in the concentration camps. Of her siblings, by great grandmother was the only one to escape to America with her husband before World War II. Standing in that boxcar, I couldn’t help feeling ridiculously lucky. I am one of the only descendants of two families that were huge and full of life. If my great grandmother had not decided to emigrate, the overwhelming likelihood is that I would not be alive today. Although I was born decades later in another country, I still felt the loss in that moment of a family that I was never able to know. Adolph Hitler was a horrible man. This is common knowledge. Adolph Hitler was an incredibly abusive dictator who murdered 6 million Jews and 5 million innocents. This is also common knowledge. But what I did not see until I was standing in that museum is that Hitler took away so much potential. Those murdered people could have been husbands and wives, doctors or lawyers, poets or soldiers. If they had been allowed to grow and flourish, the world might have been a very different place because of their contributions. It is easy to look at numbers and to read stories, but until you stand in the shoes of someone en route to their death, it is impossible to truly comprehend the loss of humanity that occurred due to the Holocaust.

The Holocaust Museum opened my eyes to the responsibility that I share with the other members of my generation- the responsibility to preserve the legacy of those who were silenced by hatred and prejudice, and to ensure that it the world becomes a place where these injustices will never be permitted again.