Teachers were the students when the Michigan State University College of Engineering again hosted a Research Experiences for Teachers (RET) program that supports authentic summer research experiences for middle and high school educators.
Eight local STEM teachers spent six weeks in online hybrid learning, enhancing their abilities to translate research experiences into classroom activities and curriculum updates. Among the goals of RET is to broaden student awareness of and participation in computing and engineering pathways.
See WILX TV 10 video: https://tinyurl.com/2aydm43a
The local teachers who “graduated” from this year’s RET experience on Friday, July 28, at the MSU Engineering Building are:
- Christina Abbott, Okemos High School
- Dean Buggia, Okemos High School
- Becky Eyestone-Malbouref, Waverly Middle School
- Denise Falcione, Okemos High School
- Brian Harrod, Okemos High School
- Thamira Hindo, Lansing Community College
- Zachary Marshall, Waverly High School
- Orion Smith – East Lansing High School.
RET is part of MSU’s outreach in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). The summer program is funded by the National Science Foundation, with Wen Li, professor of electrical and computer engineering as principal investigator (PI) and Drew Kim, assistant to the dean for recruitment, scholarship, and K-12 outreach in the MSU College of Engineering, serving as project manager and co-PI.
Kim said adopting an online hybrid model this year helped make the 2023 program among the best ever.
“Students ultimately benefit from all of these efforts,” Kim said. “We’re in the fourth cycle of our NSF-RET program and have learned that our posts at TeachEngineering.com have been viewed 25,000 times by teachers and others seeking lessons and activities. After 14 years, I think this year really came together great. We couldn’t do it without our faculty members and their doctoral students.”
This year’s faculty mentors are: Shaoting Lin, Wen Li, Jinxing Li, Sijia Liu, Vaibhav Srivastava, Xiaobo Tan, Zhen Qiu and Arun Ross.
Doctoral graduate mentors: are Xiang Liu, Claudia Chen, Jianchen Liu, Aochuan Chen, Ankur Ankur, Yifan Liu, Vittorio Mottini, Jiabin Liu, Redwan Sony and Ryan Ashbaugh.
Kim said support staff included Pahoua Nguyen, Christina Kent, DECS and the ECE department.
Among those coming to Friday’s poster presentations was Christopher Contag, Hannah Distinguished Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Microbiology & Molecular Genetics and director of the Institute for Quantitative Health Science & Engineering.
Contag said programs involving teachers are one of the greatest impacts MSU can have related to STEM.
“Teachers can take their enthusiasm back to their classrooms and influence students who will become our undergraduate and graduate students. To have a program like this is amazing," he added.
