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Researchers at CU Boulder have received a prestigious NSF Award to teach students in rural K-12 schools around Colorado about air and soil quality monitoring.

Assistant Professor Kaushik Jayaram is part of an interdisciplinary team who have received a Â鶹ÊÓƵ Outreach Award for their efforts to get the next generation of STEM programming into rural K-12 schools in Colorado.

By engaging with high schoolers through hands-on learning and real-world problem solving, graduate students in mechanical engineering are aspiring to get younger generations excited about STEM fields.

180 middle schoolers from STEM Launch in Thornton, Colorado, had the chance to see first-hand how awe-inspiring engineering can be, thanks to an outreach fair organized by the Paul M. Rady Department of Mechanical Engineering.

PhD student Aniya Khalili was looking for a research lab that would match her values. She found that match in 2019 with Professor Shelly Miller and was introduced to the practice of community-engaged scholarship.

Department Chair Michael Hannigan and Research Associate Daniel Knight will be using the $24,000 grant to expand their outreach program that engages K-12 students to conduct their own soil quality research.

Senior design team Urchin Merchants, who placed fourth, hope to market a specialized suction device to divers and conservation groups that could help save kelp forests off the coast of California and ecosystems around the world from exploding purple sea urchin populations.

The Early Engineering Exposure Fair, organized by mechanical engineering graduate students, was comprised of 16 interactive exhibits to demonstrate diverse engineering fields such as air quality, wind energy, robotics and microfluids.

The Committee for Equity in Mechanical Engineering invited freshmen from Arrupe Jesuit High School to campus, where they built robots and toured the Integrated Teaching and Learning Laboratory.

The group of mechanical engineering seniors is the first Â鶹ÊÓƵ team to compete in the U.S. Department of Energy’s Collegiate Wind Competition (CWC) – an event in which future engineers are challenged to find a unique solution to a wind energy project.