UC uses robots, animals to engage students in science

To get more high school students to engage in science, the University of Cincinnati is turning to a seemingly unlikely pair — cool robots and amazing animals.

The National Science Foundation funded an unusual program at UC that combined faculty research in animal olfaction and color vision as well as bat echolocation with instruction in engineering.

The goal is to recruit underrepresented high school students to the fields of science, technology, engineering and math, or STEM, by applying lessons related to animal senses to designing and building autonomous robots.

The innovative effort included faculty from biological sciences, psychology, mechanical engineering and electrical engineering as well as community partners. Advancing both collaboration and inclusion exemplifies the university’s Next Lives Here strategic direction.

“It’s a unique program because we’re bridging two fields,” said program director Stephanie Rollmann, an associate professor of biological sciences in UC’s McMicken College of Arts and Sciences.

STEM fields are seeing increasing representation among women and minority groups, but underrepresentation is still widespread. According to the National Science Board, women hold just 29 percent of STEM jobs despite making up half of the college-educated workforce. And minority groups are underrepresented as a percentage of the STEM workforce.

“We’re trying to increase underrepresented groups in STEM. That can lead to more creativity, more interesting ideas and innovation because you have people with different perspectives at the table,” Rollmann said.

The high school students engaged in hands-on activities relating to sensory biology and engineering.

“This program is the interface between two really broad disciplines,” Rollmann said. “I think it’s important for them to start thinking about connections between fields. That will position them well for the future.”

UC partnered with the Cincinnati Museum Center, the Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden and the Cincinnati robotics company Festo. Students visited the zoo to learn about animal abilities. The museum center gave students an up-close look at some of its bats so they could understand how they use sound to navigate in the dark.

Students studied how termites use scent trails to navigate. And for an exercise on color, they wore glasses with colored lenses that required them to collaborate with teammates wearing different colors to figure out the colors on flashcards in front of them.

“Is this darker than this one? Do you see blue?” Mason High School student Shyam Sekar asked his teammates. “Are these two the same to you?”

The team went through the deck deliberately, sorting each color and finding the match on a poster in front of them. They made short work of the exercise, scoring 100 percent.

“You can only see one color but by comparing information with your neighbors, you can deduce the other colors. That’s exactly how your eyes work,” UC’s Layne said.

To illustrate olfactory prowess, UC police K-9 officer Lance Long and his yellow Labrador retriever, Dozer, put on a demonstration. Dozer is trained as an explosives-detection dog and helps police search venues before public events. UC police also work with law enforcement agencies around the region, Long said.

“Having a K-9 is like owning a truck — everyone wants to borrow it,” he joked.

Long hid a bean bag with explosives residue in a niche of a Dumpster behind a campus building and set Dozer to work investigating the area while the students watched. The dog alerted to the bag in less than a minute of hard looking and earned his reward, a tennis ball.

The students laughed and crowded around to pet Dozer.

Long said no technology is better than a dog’s nose at discerning smells.

Cincinnati Public Schools science teacher Gloria Ononye said she wants to apply some of the techniques from the UC program to her own classroom. She’s already arranged to return to UC with her class to see a scanning electron microscope.

“I watched the professors and thought, 'This is how we should be teaching,'” Ononye said.

Celeste Leonard is a student at the Zoo Academy at Hughes STEM High School. She is interested in engineering but was concerned about how well she would do in college without a strong background in subjects such as chemistry. But after meeting UC engineering professors and students who might one day be her engineering classmates, she is more confident in her abilities, she said.

“It’s intimidating for me, but I feel like I’m more prepared for college,” she said. “I’m leaning more to engineering because I want to know how things work.”

Featured image at top: Students collaborate on a robotics project. Photo/Andrew Higley/UC Creative Services