Seven Engineering Ambassadors volunteered to work on the NOVA project
Kids Building Stuff—With Help From WPI Students
WPI students huddled together around tables strewn with copper tape, cardstock, scissors, coin cell batteries, vibration motors, nail clippers, and paperclips. Some students picked up and examined the items. Others opened their laptops and studied a diagram. It was a training session for WPI’s Engineering Ambassadors, a group of 42 undergrads who work with the Office of Pre-Collegiate Outreach Programs to get young students excited about STEM. On this day, the trainees were putting together a wristband that could send Morse code signals using motorized vibrations. It’s one of the projects featured in the recent NOVA docuseries Building Stuff and the ambassadors were making sure they could complete it themselves before teaching it to younger students. The student ambassadors got to work with a hum of animated chatter. Individual voices periodically stood out from the rest:
Assembling the mechanical wristband
“Actually, a paperclip would be really nice.” “I’m so confused.” “We got it!!” One student smiled while raising an arm encircled by a vibrating wristband. Ambassadors as troubleshooters Last summer staff from GBH, Boston’s PBS affiliate and producer of the popular science show NOVA, recruited the Engineering Ambassadors to troubleshoot instructions for the wristband and two other hands-on projects in an outreach toolkit that supplements the Building Stuff docuseries. “The Engineering Ambassadors’ mission goes right along with what GBH was trying to do with this documentary, which is getting younger folks interested in STEM,” says James Guaragna, associate director of WPI’s pre-collegiate outreach programs. NOVA’s outreach kit helps classroom teachers and community groups further demystify the engineering topics covered in the docuseries by getting viewers to learn by doing. Each project in the booklet corresponds to one of the series’ episodes: “Boost It!,” “Reach It!,” and “Change It!” Seven WPI ambassadors volunteered to try out the projects and offer input to help GBH staff clarify the toolkit’s written instructions. “Their feedback was extremely helpful and informative in making sure that the engineering activities had instructions and diagrams that were easy to follow for students and would keep students engaged,” says Ralph Bouquet, NOVA’s director of education and outreach. Mechanical engineering major Jorge Saa ’26 tested the wristband project, which was inspired by a section of the documentary about haptics. “When we looked at the first diagram that we were given, we were confused. The instructions were a bit broad, but we made it work,” Saa says. “Then we met with the GBH people who designed the project and gave them a few recommendations on what information to include.”
Saa’s team also suggested some technical tweaks to the materials in the outreach toolkit, including making the electrical contacts bigger so students without previous experience maneuvering wires would have an easier time connecting them with the battery.
“If you’re in middle school, maybe you can work with tiny wires and contacts. High school? Definitely. But elementary school? That’s a big maybe,” he says.
Relatable role models
Figuring out the target age group for a project is an important part of the Engineering Ambassadors’ work. Every year they host events for roughly 75 school groups from around Central and Eastern Massachusetts. Most are in sixth, seventh, or eighth grade, but groups as young as fourth grade sometimes come. The fact that many of the ambassadors vividly remember their own experiences with STEM in middle school is a big part of why they are so successful at translating concepts to younger students in ways that older adults can’t.
WPI helped found the national Engineering Ambassadors program in 2011. Since then they have developed a repertoire of about 50 hands-on projects to do with school groups. Each project gets the younger students thinking about how modern life depends on engineering, and a short presentation from the ambassadors introduces the project’s topic.
Take, for instance, windmills. Ambassadors present the concept of wind energy in terms simple enough that sixth graders will be interested in it. Then small groups of the younger students work together—with help from ambassadors as needed—to build a windmill out of basic supplies like index cards and pencils.
“It gets kind of competitive,” Guaragna says. “They see how strong they can build their windmills by testing how many pennies they can lift up.”
Engineering in everyday context
The projects that WPI students tested for the NOVA outreach kit now give the Engineering Ambassadors three additional options to choose from when deciding what activity to lead with visiting school groups.
Sofia Murphy ’27, the student who showed off the completed mechanical wristband during the training session, was among those who volunteered with GBH. Murphy’s team tested a project that gets kids thinking about the connection between engineering and textiles, then developed the introductory presentation for that project.
“Our opening hook is to say, ‘Imagine it’s a hot, sunny day over summer break. What are you going to wear when you go outside to play with your friends? Now imagine it’s the day after a snowstorm. It’s really cold outside and you have to get to school. What are you going to wear?’” they say.
James Guaragna looks at the wristband diagram with two Engineering Ambassadors
As a robotics engineering major, Murphy was eager to work on this project because it’s an area of engineering they hadn’t thought much about previously. Their presentation for visiting school groups goes on to “talk about how engineers test different materials when designing protective suits for humans to explore extreme environments, what they’re protecting people from, and how that’s helping humans push the boundaries of what we’re capable of.”
Every student who participates in an Engineering Ambassadors session goes home with a paper describing what they did that day. When the day’s activity is one of the NOVA projects, WPI is able to highlight that work from our students appeared on a national stage.
That’s an added bonus for an already-great program, Guaragna says. Not only do the ambassadors’ presentations and activities get younger students excited about STEM and the possibility of going to college, he says, “it also really helps our WPI students explain complex topics in basic terms, which is helpful in the industry when they work with non-engineers.”
Latest WPI Latest News
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