Outreach

The Soft Materials and Structures Lab participates in outreach activities with students, teachers, and the general public. We have developed interactive presentations with hands on demonstrations on bio-inspired materials and robotics. Notably, we have developed an interactive ‘Soft Robotic Gripper Activity’, where participants work as a team to move the gripper into position and deploy actuators through a series of valves to pick up objects.  In addition, we have engaged and mentored students ranging from middle school to undergraduate students on technical career paths. Through these efforts we have worked with various groups including the World Science Festival in the Cool Jobs program, Science Bound (pre-college program to empower students of color ), middle school classes, co-hosted a First robotics team (Wave Droids), presented at the Society of Women Engineers (SWE) general meetings, hosted Women in Science and Engineering (WiSE) University for high school females in STEM, and presented groups from the Center for the Enhancement of Engineering Diversity (CEED) including CTech^2 students (11th/12th grade young women) and the Galileo Living Learning Communities (first-year engineering students).