InnoWorks 2005 Duke camp gives students close-up look at science

By Paul Bonner

Using their arms to make a lane for a robotic car, middle-school students tested the vehicle's sensors that kept it traveling between the barriers.

A program on a laptop computer communicated with the Lego-built car's electronic controller.

The four-student team calling themselves Team Sponge was part of InnoWorks, a day camp at Duke University to allow middle-schoolers to have fun with scientific projects.

Founded by Duke engineering senior Billy Hwang, InnoWorks is run by college students at Duke and at the University of Maryland.

Robot cars

At Duke last week, InnoWorks got Durham middle-school students into investigations and competitions under the theme "Making Sense of Senses." The robot car competition involved negotiating a maze and dumping a payload on cue. Nearly 30 college-student volunteers were mentors for the 44 middle-school students. The latter were chosen from among those receiving free and reduced-price lunches, most of them at Chewning Middle School.

As the robot car teams worked in the Fitzpatrick Center at the Pratt School of Engineering, other students at a lab in Duke's Biology Department nearby used microscopes to examine termite innards, cells from inside their cheeks and bacteria that remained on their hands even after washing.

"Could you eat wood?" Hwang asked the students. "Could you digest it?" Unlike the termites, he explained, we don't have the special bacteria in our digestive tracts that enable them to dine on 2-by-4s.

Other projects included fingerprint analysis and other crime scene investigation techniques using homemade pH indicators made from cabbage juice and chromatography to analyze ink to identify a pen used to write a note. Students made model rockets and studied their trajectories and pretended to be music producers, designing and building electronic circuits to extract a vocal track from a musical recording.

"We want to make them more enthusiastic about science and learning in general," Hwang said. "We're throwing a lot at them, but they're in a team atmosphere that helps them in building confidence."

Busy leader

Hwang undertakes a good bit himself, as a senior with a triple major in biomedical engineering, physics and electrical and computer engineering who already has published several papers in scientific research journals. Somehow, he also manages to edit a campus humanities journal and play violin in the university symphony.

Established as a nonprofit corporation with Hwang as its director, this is the second summer for InnoWorks, for which he and others have developed a curriculum and training materials. The program has gained sponsorship from GlaxoSmithKline, Cisco Systems, the Burroughs Wellcome Fund and others. It is free to the campers, with lunch provided.

As Team Sponge worked out the bugs in its robotic car, team member Kenneth Blanding, who attends Chewning, said his favorite team competition during the weeklong camp was dropping eggs without breaking them, from the stairways in the Fitzpatrick Center's atrium to its flagstone floor. His team achieved the highest drop, using padding and a parachute. He also helped the team redesign its rocket's fins to increase the craft's trajectory and the fins' durability.

"I learn new things every day," Blanding said.

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