Outreach

Future Advancers of Science and Technology FAST had their annual symposium at Stanford where high school students present their research projects and spend a day at Stanford. During the symposium, a group of students from FAST toured Shape Lab. We discussed shape-changing robotics, haptic interfaces, and rehabilitation technologies with them, and several lab members talked about their work.

STaRS is a program meant to introduce students to research in biology and medicine. During one of their tour days, we hosted them to show them the work that we do in Shape Lab.

We hosted a Shape Lab tour with demos for high school students who were interested in learning more about our research. This event was coordinated with the Stanford FAST Program.

Rainstorm is a group that organizes online classes, seminars, and workshops for high school students. We hosted 20 students in our revised course entitled “Stores in 2D: Sketching & Design Thinking;” in which, we covered some elements of design thinking and gave students the opportunity to draw their own new objects and discuss these drawings with their peers.

Rainstorm is a group that organizes online classes, seminars, and workshops for high school students. We hosted 20 students in our course entitled “Stores in 2D: Sketching & Design Thinking;” in which, we covered some elements of design thinking and gave students the opportunity to draw their own new objects and discuss these drawings with their peers.

GetSet is a program to help girls explore technology, sciene, and engineering together. We hosted 30 students through a lab tour explaining some of our current work and a small activity on mechanical systems.

Every Thursday night, the Exploratorium holds the After Dark event where people come to the museum in the evening for themed interactive exhibits. We were invited to come and brought along three demos from our lab that showed different aspects of touch including a shape-shifting haptic display, visio-haptic VR illusion, and tabletop swarm robots. Additionally, Prof. Sean Follmer gave a talk on embodied engagement in the virtual world with a focus on haptic technologies.

Splash is a program that brings students in grades 8-12 from everywhere to Stanford’s campus for a two-day learning extravaganza. We ran a class titled Stories in Motion: Mechanical Automata and Rapid Prototyping on design automata.

We hosted shape lab tour and demos for 16 Stanford undergraduates interested in learning more about what research in engineering looks like. This event was coordinated with the GradSWE Stanford chapter.

Tayo and Alexa demoed two research projects at the 2019 Web4All Hackathon organised by the DIAGRAM Center and PEAT (Partnership on Employment and Accessible Technology): 1) shapeCAD, an accessible 3D modelling for people who are blind and visually impaired that used a 2.5D tactile shape display to provide interactive tactile feedback. 2) Tactile Code Skimmer, a device that represents lines of code physically with the goal of improving skimming through code. Both projects were presented at ASSETS 2019.

Read more about the exciting hackathon projects and outcomes here

SeeME is a program meant to introduce students to mechanical engineering topics. During a single day, high school and middle school students take multiple classes to learn about engineering. We ran a class that focused on prototyping techinques through the creation of automata.