ECE Professor Collaborates with The Achievement Project (TAP) during One-Week Summer Program

As part of his NSF CAREER grant titled, "Decentralized Control and Optimization Techniques for Autonomic Performance Management of Distributed Computing Systems," Prof. Naga Kandasamy and his students Dara Kusic (Ph.D. student) and Gabriele Palmas (BS student) collaborated with The Achievement Project (TAP), a community-based educational support project, to conduct a week-long tutorial for twenty middle-school students from July 7-11, 2008 on Roomba Programming. The goal of this tutorial was to write simple Java programs to control a Roomba Robot, thereby enabling it to perform a series of challenges (beyond the typical vacuuming of the floor), including navigating a maze. The TAP students spent three hours each afternoon in the ECE computer lab at Drexel University learning to write and execute simple programs that controlled the behavior of their Roombas, such as making the Roomba move or follow a set pattern. The final challenge for the students was to program the Roomba to navigate a maze in the shortest possible time.

TAP recruits a group of high school students from under-represented populations in Chester, Pennsylvania, who commit to the program before they enter high school, and works exclusively with that collection of students throughout their four years of high school and through the application and acceptance process at a college. Every summer, TAP members attend an intensive six-week educational advancement session (the Roomba programming tutorial was a part of the summer activities). They also participate in tutoring, counseling, and enrichment activities held during the course of the regular school term.

Special thanks goes to Professor William Regli of the CS department for loaning the Roombas used in the tutorial.

Posted on September 26, 2008

How is electrical engineering related to music and sound?

As part of his NSF CAREER Award, Dr. Youngmoo Kim initiated the Summer Music Technology (SMT) Program, held most recently in July 2007 and August 2008. This innovative, one-week learning experience provides high school first- and second- year students with a unique opportunity to learn about digital audio and music production technology. The program was developed and taught by Dr. Kim and his students in the ECE Department’s Music and Entertainment Technology Laboratory (MET-lab), and program participants were given access to the lab's equipment and facilities.

Posted on September 26, 2008

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New Facilities: Anechoic Chamber

An Anechoic Chamber, a new facility for antenna testing, was installed on the first floor of Bossone Research Enterprise Center this past year. An anechoic chamber is isolated from interference by electro-magnetic signals, such as those emitted by radio and television broadcasts, cell phones, power lines, and other electronic devices. This “quiet” chamber will allow the Department to accurately design, test and characterize antennas operating in the frequency ranges of 1 to 18 GHz, and represents a major new resource to the Drexel research community as well as local industry and government facilities that require a “quiet” electromagnetic environment for measurements and calibration.

Posted on July 1, 2008