Teaching about Anodes, Cathodes, and Redox Reactions
This past Sunday a group of other CUSD students & I were invited to lead some workshops for young students at the USS Intrepid Museum in New York City. We held two demos, working with kids to build molecules out of gumdrops, and making potato batteries to turn on LEDs. The whole day was a ton of fun, and I really enjoyed teaching the several hundred kids who filtered through about electron flow, redox reactions, and series/parallel circuits. It’s great to see so many young kids excited about engineering and science! Check out some pictures from both our workshops, and around the Intrepid Museum, below:
Me, inspecting v3 of the Truss Reconfiguration Robot that I helped design (Photo courtesy: Lindsay France/University Photography)
This past week, we finally uploaded the video for the “machine metabolism” robot that I helped develop in Cornell’s Creative Machines Lab over the past few years. The project was directed by Professor Hod Lipson, my research advisor, with the mechanical and iterative design being done by Franz Nigl, a former visiting scientist, and Shuguang Li, a former visiting Ph.D. student. I was responsible for the development of the electronics platform, and the software (written in C for an Atmega-based microcontroller) that was used in the robot shown in the photo above.
You can learn more about the goals of this project (and why we call it “machine metabolism”) on the lab’s research page, or in my portfolio. In short, this robot is capable of traversing a truss structure and reassembling it into a different configuration. Future implications include repair on the international space station, improved construction-zone safety, and autonomous skyscraper construction. Check out the video below to see it in action!
As of this semester, the team is comprised of about 150 students from over 20 majors around Cornell, and about a dozen faculty advisors. Recently, a subset of our architectural team completed renderings of what our 18,000 sq ft facility might look like. Be sure to go check out all the renders on the SRF blog. The Cornell Daily Sun recently ran a piece about the progress we’ve made in the last year, and our full-team workathon last week resulted in the creation of some amazing ideas for the facility. This semester, we’ll be completing structural drawings, building 1:1 prototypes of components of the building, and cranking up fundraising and outreach to turn this building from renders into a reality. I can’t wait to see the impact that the SRF will have on sustainability research at Cornell and around the world. The mere process of designing it has already imparted all of our student members with a wealth of experiential knowledge that a classroom could never provide.
The First Annual Cornell Startup Fair was Star Wars-Themed
Yesterday was Cornell’s first annual startup career fair. Given Cornell’s recent winning of the NYC Tech Campus Bid (with which I was also heavily involved), the startup fair was very well timed. About a year ago, while meeting with some members of Cornell’s Career Services Offices, I was expressing my dismay at the fact that the ordinary career fairs at Cornell are all for huge companies, students must dress up, and you don’t really get the opportunity to connect with the companies you might be interested in working for. So, after a few months of planning by lots of amazing people, we made the startup career fair into a reality! Approximately 40 startup companies (mostly from the NYC area) attended to recruit amazing Cornell talent. During the course of the fair, I managed to simultaneously work as a volunteer and as a recruiter representing MakerBot Industries (I consult for them part time and worked for them last summer). The fair was a huge success, with thousands of students packing the engineering atrium for about 5 hours. Checkout the local news coverage below (I was featured in the piece), the wrap-up video (featuring MakerBot) below, and this article from the Cornell Daily Sun (in which I was quoted).
