Engineering at EXPLO Pre-College: Team-Based, Hands-On, and Real-World

Dr. Nadia Barakat is a Boston-area biomedical engineering consultant who assists clients in matters from litigation to patents involving medical devices like neurostimulators, glucose monitors, and MRI scanners. She is also the lead instructor of EXPLO’s Pre-College Engineering Concentration this summer. We spoke with her about why she chose to teach at EXPLO, the value of hands-on learning, and what makes this experience special for her.

Why have you joined EXPLO to teach this summer?

At EXPLO, the curriculum is designed to be very hands-on, which is great. It’s part of the reason I took the job. Engineering is all about problem solving, and teaching is transferring those skill-sets to the next generation. We don’t normally learn those skills in school, because engineering is very lab-based—a lot of hands-on experiments that require space and resources that schools often lack. So their teaching tends to be more theoretical than hands-on.?

What’s the value of that hands-on approach?

That’s how things work in real life, right? I surveyed my students this session about their favorite ways to learn, and the majority chose hands-on activities. Students who go for engineering tend to have that interest. They start at a very early age playing with Legos and putting things together and pushing buttons, and I think when they go for engineering that’s what they expect. It’s what excites them.?

What kinds of projects have you tackled in class?

We’ve built wind turbines. We built air-powered rockets and tested how far they flew. We built some robots using a scrubbing brush—mounting a 3-volt DC motor on top with a battery pack to propel it forward. The moment you plug in the batteries the brush will move using vibrations from the motor.?

The challenge in class, though, was to make it go in a straight line. Most students focused on modifying the motor—adding two, three motors, adding more batteries, adding more power. But the trick was in the bristles. The point was not just to focus on what is typically thought of as “engineering,” like motors and batteries. Materials engineering is also a big discipline: some people major just in making different materials. So I wanted them to get that idea. You would have to orient the bristles in a certain way for the brush to go straight.?

Did anyone figure it out?

There’s some competitiveness that comes with being a high schooler that was interesting to see. The first one to figure it out must not have wanted his classmates to copy, because he came to me and whispered in my ear, “How can I change the orientation of the bristles?” And I was like, aha, that’s it! And I handed him a blow dryer so he could use the heat to adjust the bristles.

How does that kind of competitiveness work in a discipline that’s so collaborative though?

Every project we do is in teams—nothing is done individually. Each team has different roles: we have a project manager, a technical engineer, and someone in charge of drafting and notes. I pick the teams at random and let the project manager decide the roles. And it’s been great. They’re very respectful of each other—they work well in teams while being competitive.

It sounds like students are learning not just engineering skills but what it’s actually like to be an engineer.

If we have time in class I like to talk about real-life engineering and what it’s like out there. I think the students really appreciate it—it’s the bridge between real life and school. And you really only get that by working in the field. So I’m happy to be able to tell some of these stories about projects I’ve worked on where things didn’t go well, or where things went very well. About when your boss says, “Alright, this is your team,” and there’s this guy on your team who you just can’t stand. What do you do, right? School doesn’t teach you that.?

Would you have attended EXPLO as a student when you were younger?

Absolutely, yes. I see myself in these students. I’ve loved engineering from a very young age. My father is an engineer. A lot of the experiments we do with the students in class I did with him when I was a kid at home, although we had simpler materials. But absolutely, I think he definitely would have sent me here.