Category: Grant Stories

Mason and JMU “Engineers” Project for Hard-of-Hearing Community

When a proposal to fund a project entitled “Toward T-Shaped Graduates: A Joint Capstone Program at the Nexus of Mechanical Engineering and Science and Technology Policy” arrived at the 4-VA@Mason office, it was quickly apparent that it would check more than a few 4-VA boxes – creating an interdisciplinary, wholistic approach for education which utilizes technology for societal good.  As it turns out, the 4-VA Advisory Board agreed, and a grant for the research was extended.

This project asked students from James Madison University and Mason to consider how technology can be applied to solve challenges that include both technological and policy components.  Through trans-institutional partnerships, students were challenged to innovate outside of their disciplinary backgrounds by collaborating across programs.  They were guided by four faculty advisors from a range of fields — engineering, biotechnology, political science, and communications. As the lead PI Dr. Jeffrey Moran explains it, “T-shaped graduates are those that represent both a depth (the stem of the capital letter ‘T’) and breadth (top of ‘T’) of expertise.”

Moran sought to task students with the goal of addressing public needs; this often means tackling problems that straddle boundaries between disciplines. Moran noted that today’s environment calls for a new type of student and professional – an individual who is skilled in transcending disciplinary silos to address undertakings that do not fit into a single, specific category. 

Mason student and team lead Kyle Hall called the project assignment complex and challenging. “It was so broad and open, it was hard to know where to begin,” Hall says.  That, along with the shutdown brought on by the pandemic, the team (naming themselves ‘Level 6’ — see below) was prevented from meeting in person with the JMU students or with policymakers (as originally intended) to discuss the project.  Nevertheless, they forged ahead armed with research confirming that the deaf and hard-of-hearing community were often hampered by their disability when driving. 

Looking toward the future of autonomous vehicles (AV), the team settled on creating an alert system for an AV to support hard-of-hearing adults as they rode in an AV.

Their first assignment would be to learn more about the specific needs of the population. Fortunately, Hall notes, the JMU group had experience in theory and research reports and were able to provide the necessary foundation to begin project development. Additionally, because the JMU team also had experience in research involving human subjects, they were able to obtain permission from an institutional review board to start the study almost immediately.

Following the JMU start, the Mason team procured a golf cart to function as the prototype vehicle for the project, and they launched on a series of technological modifications to alert the ‘driver’ to activities around the vehicle.

First, the students created an alert system using a 360-degree microphone mounted in the cart.  The microphone, linked to a Raspberry Pi (a small onboard computer), reads sounds in the immediate area. Using machine learning approaches, the system detects 10 different sounds that signal the need for increased caution, including an ambulance, fire engine and police siren, honking horn, construction work, people yelling, children playing, and dogs barking. The process was sometimes time-consuming – as is typical for machine learning, the system had to be “trained” to recognize these sounds, sometimes taking up to 100 hours for the network to learn one sound. When one of the 10 noises is detected, a seat cushion outfitted with a haptic sensor vibrates to let the driver know that a hazard is nearby.  The driver is then prompted to read a tablet screen on the dashboard which identifies the noise.

One additional piece of instrumentation outfitted in the vehicle is a camera installed on the ceiling, which is pointed at the driver’s forehead and can read body temperature.  Although not solely relevant to deaf users, the team anticipated that body temperature checks will be widely considered the norm for ridesharing in the post-COVID-19 era.

This labor-intensive systems creation and testing was undertaken in a workshop located on the Science and Technology campus in Manassas, where the group met most Friday afternoons during the spring semester. There, Hall says, they each focused on specific elements of the technology, but worked together to ensure a seamless final product.  (In one positive outcome of the general switch to virtual learning due to the pandemic; a JMU student on the team, who was living at home in Northern Virginia taking online classes, was able to join the Mason team in person in Manassas.)    

“This project allowed the advisors and students to tackle complex, multifaceted problems for the public good while building a great relationship with our colleagues at James Madison, which will continue in the future,” says Moran.  “And the students far exceeded our expectations for finding creative solutions to difficult problems, especially during this complicated year and with such an open-ended project.”

Nathan M. Kathir, Associate Professor & Director of Senior Projects in the Department of Mechanical Engineering Projects agrees, “A primary objective of the mechanical engineering program’s senior design course, also known as the capstone program, is to enrich the educational experience of senior-level students with a real-world engineering experience.  Mason’s six students on the Team level-6 experienced much more than that.”  Kathir continues, “In the program’s five-year history, they were the first team to collaborate with those outside of Mason and they did that despite restrictions due to Covid-19 throughout the year.  In a T-shaped graduate manner, not only they used their technical expertise, but they also excelled on other areas such as collaboration, communication, partnering with external stakeholders, managing risks, and planning for unknowns.”

Hall and Moran foresee that this project could be the beginning of a true legacy project, augmented by students in the future, adding modifications for communities with vision or mobility issues.  “I can see that this project could continue to build great things,” notes Moran.

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Meet the Level 6* Team

Although each member of the team focused on specific and separate modifications for the vehicle, it was a group effort to bring the total technology to fruition.

Josh Ogden — devised the technology for the camera.

Paul Cipparone — formulated the haptic cushion.

Jeorge del Carpio Arispe — focused on the touch screen.

Oliver Lopez — worked on CAD modeling.

Raizel Clemente — handled all communications, purchases for items and materials.

Kyle Hall — organized the project and insured deadlines were met and wrote all the reports.

*The Level 6 name is a nod to the ratings of AVs – as a Tesla is considered Level 3, highly autonomous cars are Level 5 — this team’s development of technical modifications is Level 6.

While the Council for the Advancement of Higher Education Programs (CAHEP) considers the history of higher education a required knowledge area, and it is often a core course in higher education programs nationally, Mason’s Kelly Schrum, PhD, recognized that the class is rarely taught by historians and often lacks a focus on the critical thinking, research, and digital literacy skills essential for success in the rapidly changing higher education workplace.

When Schrum, a historian and associate professor of higher education, discussed this disconnect with colleague Chase Catalano, PhD, at Virginia Tech (VT), they saw that within this challenge there was an interesting opportunity:  Create a history of higher education course at Mason and VT that is founded on historical thinking and research skills. Students could work collaboratively on digital research projects that draw on university archives locally and nationally.  Moreover, they could build on this work to create an open educational resource (OER) on the history of higher education.

Schrum developed a plan, and then turned to 4-VA@Mason to seek a Collaborate Research Grant for her project entitled, “Reimagining the History of Higher Education in the Digital Age.”  Subsequently, Schrum and Catalano received 4-VA funding to help get the project off the ground and, joined by Sophia Abbot, a doctoral student at Mason, they got to work. 

Abbot, who has previously been involved with faculty development and has studied student-faculty partnerships in teaching, plays several integral roles in the project. The first is determining the current teaching landscape in higher education.  To that end, Abbot and Mason sophomore, Kelly Tcheou, sent out surveys to instructors involved in teaching the history of higher education around the country to determine the specific subject areas included in their courses.

Along with Schrum and Catalano, Abbot implemented a new primary source learning activity for their courses this past fall. While Schrum and Catalano supported students in the selection of their research topics and their analysis of primary historical sources, Abbot helped students translate their research to the digital space as they developed online learning activities for their peers. Abbot shares the example of one student’s research which looked at the history and the language of the Pell Grant.  The student gained a deeper understanding of how the language used in the original legislation resulted in who was able to gain access to the grants over the years; and who was not.  “Their research is doing exactly what we’d hoped… students are empowered to take historical thinking into their work,” says Abbot. “When students create historical narratives — learning the context and history of the sources — they can look back at sources and understand the impact of the history of higher education on colleges and universities today.”

Additionally, Abbot introduces students to the opportunity to share their work on the primary source website the team is building. Here, Abbot acts as a liaison between the Mason and VT students and faculty.  “Because I am not in an evaluation role, I am able to make sure that students understand that sharing – or not sharing — their work is completely optional and will not affect their grade.  I’m there to communicate the importance of consent,” she notes. 

Assisting Abbot with the website is Carolyn Mason who graduated from Mason in December with BA in anthropology and plans to begin a PhD program in anthropology in the fall. Mason identifies primary sources related to higher education including a university’s founding, student life, academics, and campus culture and uploads them to the website. She is also collecting a list of university archives that house historical documents related to their institution.

At the conclusion of the history courses, Abbot returns to interview students on both campuses to determine their thoughts about the class and their decision regarding sharing their work on the website.  She has interviewed 12 students and collected 19 student projects from both campuses.

While the project is still in its infancy, it has already generated a lot of attention. The prototype website https://higheredhistory.gmu.edu/ presents more than 100 primary sources. Over 60 history of higher education instructors have responded to the invitation to share their teaching practices. And the team has piloted their primary source learning activity in two different higher education graduate courses (Fall 2020) and recruited a third course to pilot the activity (Spring 2021).

“We were delighted to have the ability to enrich the study of higher education, offer our students the opportunity to develop asynchronous online learning activities, and promote collaboration across institutions,” explains Schrum.  “Already, we have had great results.”

Abbot, Schrum, and Catalano presented initial findings at the Conference on Higher Education Pedagogy in February.

“This project has been a wonderful exercise in collaboration and research,” concludes Schrum.  “In fact, it has caught the eye of our colleagues at several additional 4-VA schools who are interested in partnering with us on this in the future.  We are also looking at the development of a workshop on this for instructors in the history of higher education. There may be more to come!”

Of the 21 iterations of the definition of the word ‘scale’ in the Oxford Dictionary, one is particularly applicable to the latest 4-VA grant project “Scalable Molecular Dynamics;” that is: “the full range of different levels of people or things.” This definition illustrates both the scope of the research and the collaborators involved in the effort.

While orchestrating a variety of other projects and programs at Mason’s Center for Simulation and Modeling (CSM) located in the College of Science, lead PI Dr. Estela Blaisten-Barojas took on one more when she applied for and received the 4-VA grant.  Blaisten-Barojas was interested in undertaking a serious study of predictive computational and simulation-based approaches in chemical and materials sciences combined with engineering approaches. This study is central to finding innovative solutions for environmental pollution, healthcare, sustainable energy resources, global warming, and ways of fighting terrorism, crucial to both Virginia’s and the nation’s competitiveness in science and engineering.

To launch and deliver “Scalable Molecular Dynamics” a full-throttled balancing act was necessary, Blaisten-Barojas called in her colleague Dr. Robert Handler from the Mechanical Engineering department at Volgeneau and Dr. Eric Weisel, Executive Director, Virginia Modeling, Analysis, and Simulation Center (VMASC) at Old Dominion University, a 4-VA partner school.  Then, she added a number of talented students, including Gideon Gogovi, Scott Hopkins and James Andrews, to her 4-VA team.  Each brought countless hours of research to the project – enhancing both the collective mission and their personal portfolios.

Blaisten-Barojas was interested in testing computational techniques for scaling up various aspects of a molecular simulation in which a large molecule is solvated or flows in a viscous solvent. Specifically, they studied the atomistic behavior of the polymer polyacrylamide, or PAM. This polymer, when immersed in gel-type solvents, is used for the separation of proteins, an important component in bio detection.

The team’s research identified several interesting and notable characteristics regarding the structure and energetics of PAM in implicit and explicit solvents – as team members studied the chain shape and the diversity of coiling and twists of the polymer in the various solvents. The researchers noted closely the changes in shape from an elongated spaghetti string to a more football-like object.  Importantly, based on what they learned, they were able to make some scaling up predictions about how big structures can grow.  This new understanding is valuable for efficiently controlling the performance of devices based on molecular components.Once the project got moving, the full range definition of scalability was set in motion.  In fact, the simulations were so complex that they reached the maximum allowed in Argo, Mason’s centralized research computing cluster.

Already, two conference presentations have been made based on the research – a talk and a poster at the recent American Chemical Society (ACS) Mid Atlantic Research Meeting; two journal papers are in submission.

Blaisten-Barojas notes that although the research, results and dissemination have been gratifying, it was the new-found relationship with the VMASC which capped the full range of different levels of people and subjects concept.  “This is a very important first step,” Blaisten-Barojas notes. “We now know who they are and they know who we are.  I know that if they see possibilities in some of their initiatives, they will knock on our door first and we will do the same.”

More than 140 leaders from Virginia’s K-12 and higher education institutions, out-of-school providers, the private and business sectors, and state officials and institutions joined together recently to begin the work of developing a blueprint for a statewide STEM network.  This structure will be the basis for creating cross sector pedagogies providing Virginia’s youth access to a learning environment which will allow them to grow important skills to engage in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics from PreK – 16.  “Virginia’s STEM Summit” was hosted by Virginia Commonwealth University and sponsored through a grant from 4-VA.  The project was developed by a group 4-VA schools – VCU, Virginia Tech, George Mason, James Madison, and University of Virginia in coordination with the Virginia Department of Education and the Office of the Governor.

Governor Ralph Northam has charged Virginia’s STEM leaders with the job of creating an infrastructure, with input from all stakeholders, for the newly-appointed Virginia STEM Education Commission.  The strategic plan is due next year.

As 4-VA grant team member and Associate Director of the Center for Educational Networks and Impacts at Virginia Tech Susan Magliaro, explained, “Our goal today is to provide a well woven tapestry of information from our STEM leaders.”

The day-long conference began with a keynote address from retired NASA astronaut, materials science engineer, educator, and former NFL wide receiver Leland Melvin.  Melvin shared with the audience how STEM education necessitates an open mind, perseverance, and personal support in order to be successful.  George Mason University’s PI on the project, Dr. Padmanabhan Seshaiyer noted, “Leland was the perfect kick-off for our conference.  He clearly illustrated that STEM doesn’t have to be stuffy or difficult to understand, it’s a hands-on experiential learning opportunity which can open doors for all of our students, and especially our minority or underserved students.  It can bring projects and process to life.”

Other Mason participants in this 4-VA summit included members with diverse backgrounds and expertise in STEM including Dr. Rebecca Jones, Ms. Kelly Knight, Dr. Karen Lee, Dr. Kammy Sanghera and Ms. Kerin Hilker-Balkissoon.

The conference also included a panel discussion addressing some of the more difficult obstacles to overcome while implementing STEM programs, presented by a range of leaders from the business, education and policy arenas.  Each highlighted best practices developed by state or local school boards from around the country.  The consensus was that successful existing ecosystems in STEM were developed by building a culture which welcomed all stakeholders, and where the resulting guidelines represented a convergence of values and practices.

Following the panel discussions, attendees joined together to hammer out the framework for such ecosystems based on their professional backgrounds.

Longtime STEM proponent Amy Sabarre, Director of STEM Education for the Harrisonburg City Schools, observed, “I’ve been involved with the development of a core curriculum for STEM in the Commonwealth for years, and this Summit has been a long time coming.  But, we’re here now, and we’re making great strides.”

Concurrently, newer stakeholders see the same bright future.  Says Makerspace coordinator at William and Mary, Jonathan Frey, “Makerspaces have been growing and evolving at a dramatic pace throughout the world.  What was once a location for tinkerers to play with technology has now become an impactful community engineering center both in academia and the private sector.  Here in the Commonwealth there are dozens of makerspaces and it’s time to coordinate collaboration throughout Virginia.  The 4-VA STEM Summit offers an opportunity for introduction and collaboration between such efforts from the peaks of Appalachia to the sands of the eastern shore.”

The day concluded with a group effort to integrate the work created at each roundtable into a viable framework for the Commonwealth.  The conclusions will provide the basis for the STEM ecosystem build out and will be forwarded to the Virginia’s STEM Education Commission.