Schools

High School Students Explore Science in Intense Rutgers University Program

A group of 88 students from across the state spent 27 days at Rutgers. They showcased their projects on Friday.

Princeton High School student Sabar Dasgupta is part of a group of students working on a project to help victims of trauma type by using facial expressions and thoughts.

Lawrence Township High School student Pratyush Hiremath is part of a group hoping to help military aircraft take off quicker in combat situations.

Another group is building on its mentor’s college project of creating a robot that operates underwater.

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A group of 88 academically advanced students took part in a summer program with the Rutgers University Governor’s School of Engineering and Technology this summer, concluding with a Symposium on Friday, July 26 at the International Lounge at the Student Campus Center.

Students were chosen for the program from a group of over 325 applications throughout the state, according to Assistant Director of the Governor’s School of Engineering and Technology Jean Patrick Antoine.

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“It’s a very competitive program,” Antoine said. “You need to be nominated by your school, and each school can only nominate one student for every 325 in the junior class.”

So if a school has 325 juniors, only one can be nominated. If it has 326, two can be nominated, and so on.

Two committees then determine who joins the program in an intense selection process Antoine compared to applying for college, complete with SAT scores. Everyone in the program already took their SAT before they were juniors in high school.

Once in the program, students spend 27 days on campus at Rutgers University, working from 8:30 a.m. to 10 p.m.

They take a Robotics class and a Physics class, and three electives. They go on tours and hear from guest speakers, such as Theoretical Physicist Jim Gates.

They are also paired into groups of 3-5 to work on projects, based on interest, for the duration of the program.

On Friday, the students finished the program by presenting their projects in three auditoriums, and eight groups were available for further public discussion in the lounge.

This included the group Dasgupta participated in. Their project used Morse Code to translate facial movements into words. Specific facial movements corresponded with characters on a keyboard, allowing a person wearing a headset the group supplied to spell out words.

There are some limitations, as it can take very long time to type out a sentence using expressions. The group also added a word prediction system, similar to that used by smartphones, to predict what words a person is trying to type. Like many word processing systems, it adds words to its vocabulary as it goes along, significantly increasing speed.

While there are a lot of systems designed to help victims of trauma, there is nothing similar to this currently on the market.

Dasgupta called the program “inspirational.”

“I was very impressed by the quality of the teaching and the organization of the whole program,” Dasgupta said. “ … A lot of people at my school were interested in this program, and I was lucky to be given the opportunity to be part of it.”

He worked with Joe Doyle, of Marlton; Radshwar Arora, of Edison; and Rachel Yang, of Leonia.

Hiremath worked with a group that aimed to make it easier for military cargo planes to takeoff quickly. By attaching a rocket to the plane and using an electric motor, his group reduced the distance traveled before takeoff by their model plane by more than half.

Once in the air, the plane jettisoned the rocket after five seconds.

“It helps the plane avoid enemy attack,” Hiremath said. “ … I got a lot out of this program. It showed me how college would be and helped me identify what I might be interested in within my field.”

Hiremath worked with Nicholas Ferraro, of Howell; David Prilutsky, of Jersey City; Brandon Webster, of Watage; and Jacob Davenport, of Salem.

Mentor Aaron Mazzeo, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanics and Aerospace Engineering at Rutgers, had the chance to see his group follow in the footsteps of a project he started at Harvard. His group created a robot that works underwater.

“Our project was looking at fabricating robots differently,” Mazzeo said. “I gave them a number of ideas, and without any prompting, they focused on the aquatic robot.”

The robot was made to look like a jellyfish, and the group figured out just the right balance to be able to get it to move around underwater with the use of a syringe, as demonstrated in the video attached to this post.

Mazzeo said it’s not the first time the experiment has been tried, and it won’t be the last.

“I’m happy they pursued it,” Mazzeo said. “I never thought the project would be of any use. I worked with this stuff, and it was fun, and then others see it, and they say, ‘I want to do that, too.’”

His group included Nikhal Jog, of Parsipanny Hills,; Christina Dormbusch, of Glen Gardner; Billy Jeons, of Wayne Hills; and Benjamin Hoyounglee, of Upper Saddle River.

Other projects included the creation of a motor that starts with the use of an energy source. It then jettisons that energy source and can run independently for up to 10 hours. There was also an experiment that explored the use of brain waves, and another that evaluated stress levels.


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