Professional

K-12 Outreach

Over the years, I have gotten involved in several K-12 initiatives. My involvement has varied from being very brief to a few years. Most of these have been avenues where students get exposed to something new outside their classroom in a hands-on manner.

Introducing ECE to high-school students

I have volunteered with ECE Outreach Spark Saturdays as a lab teaching assistant since Fall 2013 introducing ECE to high school students. The demand for the program grew over time and we wanted to make it reachable to a larger number of students. As a step towards that, Mary Beth Galanko and I initiated the Mobile Labs Program, which I co-chaired from Sep 2014-Dec 2016. In Spring 2015, we got our first funding from the ProSEED/Crosswalk Seed Grant and piloted the program at Oakland Catholic High School, Pittsburgh and the program currently has standalone mobile lab modules in various areas of ECE, such as programming, Arduino, energy harvesting, building a radio circuit, audio analysis. From 2013-2015, I also assisted in the once-a-semester High/Middle School Days organized by Society of Women Engineers where we conduct a hands-on lab for school students on our campus.

Hands-on science for primary, middle school students

From Fall 2012 till Summer 2014 I volunteered with Carnegie Mellon Institute for Talented Elementary and Secondary Students (C-MITES). I assisted in mathematics, robotics and science hands-on classes for grade 1-5 students. For a brief period in 2013, I volunteered remotely (thanks to Janani Subramanian!) with Agastya International Foundation, India in revising instructor manual for an Activity Based Learning module for teaching a physics course purely through experiments for grade 6-8 students. Through both these avenues, I found it interesting to be exposed to learning science through the experiment-observe-question-understand process. Back in 2009, I volunteered for a year with Youth for Seva in Kidwai Memorial Institute of Oncology, where we conducted classes for children who had discontinued their schooling. As part of YFS, I also mobilzed funds for buying school kits to distribute to students in public schools in Bangalore.