Welcome to Manly News number 23. This is a prototype of a shredder. We're currently developing a bigger shredder. So we can shred more plastic. Yes, YouTube, I hear you. This is not very safe yet. But instead of commenting that, maybe you should come here to help us out improving the shredder. Because it needs to be safer, but it also needs to be bigger so we can shred bigger plastics like this one. So yeah, we could use some help here. So come to our workspace here. Visit necks.preciousplastic.com if you're an engineer and want to help out. And also in the end we share the blueprints of this bigger shredder open source online so everyone can replicate it. That's it for the shredder. But we also could use some help with robotics, but Paul will show you a little bit more about that one. Hey guys, it's Paul. So over the past couple months, Bradford's been developing a robotic sorting system to help us figure out what types of different plastics we have when we can't identify them. But unfortunately, he's going to have to leave soon. And so the position is opening up on the team and we're accepting applications for people who want to help continue developing this system. So we thought we'd give you a taste of what's been going on and what we hope to accomplish in the future with it. So what have you been working on with this robotic arm since you got here? So what we've tested here initially is developing a proof of concept system that can pick up different pieces of plastic, identify their type, and then put them in buckets depending on the plastic type. And how is it able to sense what plastic is which? So we've borrowed a sensor from a small startup called Matoa that's designed a cheaper, near-infrared sensor to identify types of plastic. Near-infrared is usually what's used to identify plastic types.  So Bradford, can you tell us why we're even looking into robotics in the first place? Yeah. So right now, sorting plastic is one of the most expensive parts of large-scale recycling systems.  And the reason it's sent off to be burned is because it's expensive to sort that remaining plastic into all the other different types, probably properly. Why is it expensive? So it takes, you can either sort it manually or there's very high-end machines that take conveyor belts of plastic and use little air pneumatics to knock out different plastics that are identified. So we're kind of working on developing maybe an in-between solution, but moving forward, the big element is integrating with robotic operating system, which is an open-source framework to work with different kind of different robots. And it allows us to kind of design a system that can work on any given robotic arm that can integrate with ROS. So we're not tied specifically to this arm in the future because this is a very expensive, fancy industrial machine and you can't find it everywhere. Sure. So if somebody had, say, a more simple robotic arm that they maybe even built at home themselves, they'd be able to use the same software we're developing to perform the same function of sorting plastics, right? Yeah. So there's options out there where people can 3D print smaller robotics arms that still have decent reach that are open-source. You can print one for maybe 400 bucks. Cool. And can you tell us a little bit about the software that you're using to program? We're working on creating scripts that will send the location of a given piece of plastic for the robotic arm to go identify. Maybe in the future the sensor will be integrated into the vacuum gripper. So it sees where a piece of plastic is, it goes to pick it up and it identifies it while it's picking it up and then it delivers it to its goal location. Cool. So moving forward we have a lot of options we need to work on. I need to develop a vision system to identify where an object is in space. I can work on that from home but we also need to develop a delivery mechanism for the plastic like say a big conveyor belt. We need to also work on integrating a real sensor solution because our proof of concept is still slow and we haven't flushed that whole idea out. So there's people over the world working on cheaper plastic identification devices and there's a lot of room to grow there. Thank you so much for sharing this with us, man. If anybody out there wants to work on a robotic arm or help out in the forums you can check out Bradford's topic in the link below. That's all for this month. Thank you. Yeah, it's Charlotte. I'm going to be talking to you about the community news from all around the world this month. To start off with I'm going to talk about Gaston from Argentina who's just set up his first workspace.  He's built an extruder and a shredder and decided to make these amazing beams as a wood alternative. He's making benches and stairs and the quality of them is a really high standard as well and super well documented in the forums. So thank you Gaston for that. Also this mobile recycling factory that fits in a flight case is really, really cool. The case fits an injection machine and a shredder and is currently on tour and has been to New York and Spain already. It's great to see recycling on the move and reaching to people all over so well done for that guys. And it must have been pretty hard to fit it all into a flight case so pretty impressive. They also painted the machines really bright colours which is really nice. It's usually quite rare that you see the machines paint different colours. But talking of colour, thank you to EcoRec that painted their machines bright colours as well which looks super nice. Also our good friend Joey from version 3 designs some sea turtle moulds for the sea monkey project. The sea monkey project is a family run project out in Indonesia where they sail around on their boat and they build precious plastic machines and actually deliver them to islands in Indonesia and ship them to different parts of the world. Check out Sophie who is 13 years old, whying for the extruder. Pretty impressive. And as it's Christmas I thought I would show you guys this interlocking Christmas tree decoration made from plastic straws and plastic cups. Still a work in progress but nice to see that this sort of product which would usually be made from virgin plastic is being made out of recycled plastic. Okay and that is it for the community news. Please if you're using the machines to make products or your building workspaces around the world post in the forums or use the hashtag precious plastic so you can see what you guys are up to. It's super rewarding seeing you guys using the machines to make all this weird and wonderful stuff all working towards the same mission. So that's it from me for this month. Merry Christmas and I'll see you next year. Goodbye.


Our summer camps or summer day camps, they offer a variety of activities such as arts and crafts. We offer our team building activities for the children as well as sports, fitness and wellness programs. Also we offer nutrition and gardening with our summer day camp programs. With our summer day camps, kids are able to build life skills. They're able to actually build communication skills and actually they have the opportunity to be able to interact with other children which helps with their growth and development. One good thing about our summer day camps is that they not only get to interact just within our community centers and neighborhood parks, but they also get the opportunity to take several field trips and field experiences during and throughout the summer. If you're not coming to one of our City of Columbia summer day camps, you're missing out on a great opportunity again to collaborate with other children to be able to gain friendships, life skills and participate in various other activities. So my suggestion to you is that you get out, come out for the summer, enjoy our Greenview Water Park, MaxiGregg Water Park and various other activities that will be a part of the program.


Corsitin, QUE, has been shown to have excellent anti-inflammatory, anti-oxidant, anti-microbial, and wound healing properties, making it a promising candidate for the development of novel treatments for diabetic wound infections. In this study, researchers developed polylactic acids slash poly, vinyl pyrrolidone, PP, co-electrospun fibers loaded with QUE as a drug delivery system for the treatment of diabetic wound infections. The results showed that these fibers had a bimodal diameter distribution with contact angles ranging from 120 degrees to 127 degrees and then decreasing to 0 degrees within 5 seconds, indicating their hydrophilicity. Additionally, the QUE-loaded PP fibers released QUE at a steady rate over time in simulated wound fluid SWF. This resulted in a significant reduction in the expression of pro-inflammatory genes TNF-alpha and IL1-beta in macrophase cells, suggesting that QUE may be useful in reducing inflammation associated with diabetic wound infections. This article was authored by Francesca DeCristo, Anna Valentino, Alenia DeLuca, and others.


So yesterday there were a lot of Ravens fans that definitely tuned in and just a lot of football fans period that tuned in to the latest episode of uninterrupted because it featured our guy Lamar Jackson. And we always want to see what he bought to say because you know he don't really speak too much, especially at length. So it was nice hearing him be able to just really chop it up and be himself because it wasn't like he was speaking to the media. So he had to know he was more laid back, more relaxed, more chill. But there were also a lot of headlines that have been coming out yesterday, particularly about the black quarterback in this day and age and the sort of racial bias that there is against the black quarterback in the NFL. And then Adam Schefter, today Adam Schefter put out a headline saying Ravens Lamar Jackson said racial bias against black quarterbacks is still there in the NFL. And the link was to an article that Ravens own Jamison Hensley. Well, he doesn't work for the Ravens, but he covers the Ravens for ESPN and linked his article talking about that part of the episode. But Lamar, he quote tweeted that and he said that was not my response to that specific question. Don't start that Adam. And he did, of course, a little eye roll and emoji. So he just saying, like, look, hold up, Shefti. That's not what I was referring to. But let's actually listen to that part of the show so you can hear exactly what he was saying that he was referring to. And just to give you a quick reference, LeBron James was talking about how he has so much haters. And sometimes even before games, just to get in the zone to get prepared, he'll actually go on social media and he will look for what haters are saying about him. Because so many people always doubt him, but he just loves to prove him wrong. He loves proving them wrong. So LeBron James had just finished talking about that. And let's listen to the rest. That's right. He had one of the most story successful collegiate careers at quarterback anyone's ever had. And the pro teams are asking him if he wants to switch positions to play something else. So again, they were just recapping what happened to Lamar Jackson. Of course, we know Heisman winner broke all these crazy records at Louisville as their quarterback throwing records, rushing. Just everything. He just killed it. But at the combine, a lot of these teams will ask, Hey, you want to work out as a wide receiver? You want to play something other than quarterback? And it's like, man, this dude just came from winning the Heisman. Could have actually won two Heismans. But they're like, oh, yeah, that's cool what you did. But you want to play something else? That's why they said it was disrespectful. And then they asked on the show interrupted. They asked Lamar, like, why did why did they ask you that?  And he knows like with him is crazy because he has to always watch what he says because anything that he says. A lot of people like to twist his words. They like to not even just his word, but they just like to twist stuff when it comes to Lamar Jackson. Period. Period. They just love twisting stuff around and changing stuff. So he has to be extra careful.   So they asked him like, why, why, why did they do that? Why do they make you do that? Why do they try to make you do that? I don't know. I don't know. I have no idea. But we know he got an idea. Anyway, let's keep going. You do a lot of history with them not wanting black guys to play quarterback. So that was the statement right there. There's a lot of history with them not wanting black guys to play quarterback. We have seen it time and time again where they want to change, especially if a guy is deemed a black quarterback and he's fast. Then they like, well, hey, that's an athlete. That's not a court. That's an athlete. Even a guy, I think right now Malik, what's his name? Malik Willis, I believe where the reports have been coming out saying that people are surprised how much information he can retain. And I know it's happened to guys like Terrell Pryor. He was another one. He ended up switching to wide receiver. He played quarterback flag a little bit, but he ended up switching to wide receiver. And it also happened. There was another one. I cannot think of his name off the top of my head right now, not Cardale Jones. I can't think of the guy's name off the top of my head. I think he played for Ohio State. It was a quarterback and he ended up switching, not Braxton. I can't think of his name. Y'all will know who I'm talking about, but he was a quarterback in college and then he ended up trying to switch to receiving. I think he went to the Texans, but anyway, let's keep going. But this is the statement that Lamar was replying to that, again, about the black guys. They're not really wanting black guys to play quarterback. It started like this going way back 70s, 80s and it's still, it's dying off. They don't give me more reasons to. It's dying off, but it's still there. That's why I need that championship. That's why I need that championship. And boom, that was it. That was it. That's why he said he needs that championship. Because since a lot of people are saying that they don't want black guys to play quarterback, that's what he was responding to and saying. That's why he needs that championship to just show people like, hey, we can do this too. We can retain information. We can call plays. We could do this thing too. We can make it happen. So it just seemed like he just wants to prove a lot of people wrong. And just really going over the show yesterday, some things that I saw from there just to start from the beginning. Lamar talked about how he obviously watching the Super Bowl, he would have rather been in it. And he said he felt like the Rams were going to win from jump since they had been there before. So he felt like that experience was going to help him. He talked about Aaron Donald. He said with Aaron Donald, you have to watch him every play.  Because he said that's something that they already know. So he gives him that dignity and gives him that respect. Like, y'all know you got to watch Aaron Donald. Because they should know. Like everybody knows that. Like that ain't no shock or surprise or anything like that. But they asked him, what do you think it is that makes Aaron Donald so special? And he said it's his work ethic. Now he also talked about his pregame. What does he do pregame? He said Hollywood every single game before every single game. Hollywood comes and picks him up. But he said he doesn't like being at the stadium too early. He said he usually gets there like an hour early. But he don't like being there too early. That's how I am at the airport. Because I know like, I know for my mom, like when I remember going to the airport before. She would want to go there like hours early. And that's smart because the earlier that you are there, especially with the lines nowadays too, you want to get there. You don't want to get there too late. But if you get there early, like you could chill. You could relax. If you get there late, like on my time at CPT time, then you might be rushing. You might be like starting to stress out because you got to wait. But anyway, that's beside the point. But he said he don't like to get to the airport. He don't like to get to the games too early. He said that he studies all week. But he said defenses.  And that's when LeBron stepped in. He's like, well, yeah, they try to do QB containing. And I love listening to LeBron James speak about football. I love it because you can tell like this guy knows what he's talking about. He knows what he's talking about. And I just always really appreciate that. They asked him like going into your fifth year, like what are you trying to do different? What are you trying to change? And he said that early on he was more immature. But not necessarily in a bad way. More in a naive and experienced type of way. But he said he just wants to be more mature, moving forward. And they asked him if he would consider his career a failure if he didn't win the Super Bowl. And he said, nope. Nope. There was no hesitation on that. No, it would not be a failure. I was like, oh, okay. And he said because he made it out of his environment. And he talked about how a lot of people in his environment, they know how to play football. He said they're ballers, but a lot of them just don't make it out because of the situation. And he also talked about how LeBron is his favorite basketball player. And then that's why he really wanted to be on the show. And he talked about wanting to be a billionaire and a champion. He said ever since he was a kid, those are two of the things that he wanted to make happen. Now there was a part where LeBron, LeBron said you can't care what people say anymore. You really can't because they're always going to critique everything that you do. And yeah, LeBron and NBA side. Yeah, he knows better than everybody. And he said he lost himself his first year in Miami when he came down and joined the Heat. He said they went to the championship that year and lost. But he also talked about how, whether you believe what people are saying about you or not, you can't get caught up in it. And LeBron, he also talked about how, and we talked about this earlier how before games, he'll go on social media to see what people are saying about him because they're fusing. And he loves proving people wrong. And then of course, yeah, he pointed at LeMond said he knows because they told him he couldn't play quarterback and they wanted him to switch positions. So that was what we were talking about at the beginning of this video. So we don't need to cover that again. But they also asked him if you ever have to tell a coach like, let me cook. And he said that with John Harbaugh, that Harbaugh wants to win just as bad as he does. So he really doesn't have to tell him that. He said he's focused on. He said in his first game, his first game as a starter week one in Miami in 2019, he said Harbaugh told him that it would be a lot of noise. And it was because we were loud. He said the mics might go out. And LeMond was thinking that, well, that never happened before. But then it ended up happening. But he said that he couldn't hear any of the players coming in. So but he got everybody lined up. So he just had to call the plays and whatnot. And they obviously worked because, yeah, you remember the result of that 2019 week one game. Now they did ask them all to call a play right then and there. They said, hey, so people can have a better understanding of just how difficult it is. Call a play right now. And he was like, no, I ain't about to call my plays right here on TV. No, I ain't doing that. But he did end up calling a play. And he also confirmed that he says can. If he sees something in the defense that he doesn't like, so he can change the play. So I know there have been a lot of questions about audibles and whatnot. Now that there's still is a question about it because we've heard that Greg Roman sends Lamar Jackson to the play with two plays with two options. I don't know how true this is or not. We heard that he sends Lamar to the huddle with two plays. So he either has option A option B. So that's something that we got to look a little deeper and see how that is. And then one of the last questions that he asked that he was asked is if he has a way that he wants people to feel when they watch him play. He said he doesn't really care how people feel. So he just wants to go out there and win. That's it. And that's just been with Lamar. That's been the only thing he's been saying for the past four years. He just wants to win. I mean, they do do a lot of it when he's in line up. But that's it. And he said he wants the opposing fans to be sad. So Ravens fans to just leave out them stadiums happy. And that's what we all want. Every time we go watch the Ravens play, we just want to leave out the stadium happy. Any time we watch the Ravens play period on TV, whether you watch it on the stream, whether you're watching it live, you just want to finish the game happy. That's all we really want. And we get that a lot. And sometimes we don't get it so much, but we get it a lot. But it was cool, man. Y'all make sure you watch it for yourself. It's just always nice hearing professionals, professional athletes in a more relaxed, a more calm setting. It's more chill. It's more like, yeah, it's cameras rolling and whatever, but we could be a lot more just vibing. That's it. So appreciate y'all. Love y'all. I hope y'all having a great day. We out.


My spiritual experience has its ups and downs. Sometimes it shumbles and sometimes it's glorious. Why this vibration? Spiritual experience is tumbling or you are stumbling? Possibly, but I feel with all the fear that it's old, I do it and it is not possible. It is just that I'm stumbling sometimes and sometimes it's glorious, it's life is beautiful. I can't even believe it would be so beautiful before it is made. See, what is a spiritual experience? Let's come to this first. You need to understand this. This body is something that you gathered slowly. Is that so? Is that so? Did you gather this? What is that? Sabu… What is that? Sabu aloo, what do you call that? Huh? That cannon ball, kind of thing. Sabu dana. So Sabu dana. Yesterday I was telling somebody, I was at somebody's home and I was telling them my first experience of Sabu dana way back in the Sahiyadri mountains. We won't go there. So this is all Sabu dana slowly gathered. No wonder it feels so difficult. Now this is something that you gathered. Everything that's here is something that you gathered. Your mind is a gathered phenomena, accumulated phenomena, body is an accumulated phenomena. So what you call as myself is the spirit, if you want to call it that way. It's a very contaminated word, so I generally don't use it, but now that you're using the word spirituality, it is the spirit. So if your life is about that, then you're spiritual. If your life is about the body, it is about the mind, it is about what's around you, we say you're material because these are accumulated things. What you accumulate can be yours, can never ever be you. That much is clear to us, isn't it? Yes? So whether you gathered stones or diamonds or what, they can be yours, but they can never ever be you. So when we say spirituality, we are saying it's about you. It is not about furniture in the house.  Body is like furniture for us to sit and stand, isn't it? Yes? Mind is another kind of furniture to do things. So this is not about furniture, this is about you. So spiritual process means it's about you, not about your furniture, not about your property, not about the things that you can gather and lose. So what is the experience of that? Let's not go about trying to describe, this is the experience of that. All I'm saying is it is about this. So why is it, why is it that furniture is there and you're missing? Because somewhere you don't know what you're doing. Somebody put it in a big way saying they know not what they're doing. A few basic things of eating, sleeping, reproduction, you're doing it the way it has to be done. Everything else is freaked, you understand? So that is why what is fundamental you to come into it, say your experience, we have to do all kinds of circus, hang you upside down. If you just do life the way it needs to be done, not the way your society has twisted you to do it, you will see spiritual process is always on, nobody needs to teach you. Nobody need to do anything to you because that is you. It is not an imported commodity, it is you, isn't it? It is essential you, your body is imported. Sabudana or whatever. Your mind is imported, isn't it so? But what is you has always been there, what is there to do about it? There is nothing to do about it. Too much sadhu, sabudana, so we have to clear it a little bit. So right now your life has become about things that you gather and not about you.  Nobody is recognized for what he is. Yes? Largely. So, don't make it so complicated. Yes? Oh, my spirituality, my experience, my this. Don't make spirituality like you're growing horns. Simply life.  Just be life. You will see this is wonderful.  Just be life because that's all you are and that's all you can be. You cannot be anything else. Forget about all these big, big jargon, I'm spiritual, I'm this, my spiritual experience, my ordinary experience, there's no such thing. There's just life. Are you on the surface or are you moving towards the core? That's all.


Hi there folks, Melissa Tebow here with the School of Science and Math and my colleague John Davis will be the featured event today for our video conferencing and streaming professional development from NCSSM. This is Scaling STEM and the idea is that we at NCSSM have for years been finding ways to work to scale and to try to make more of the limited resources that we have available to us as every teacher does. So we're hoping to profile some of the work that we're doing and to invite applicants and folks that are working in their schools and in their school systems as professional development providers, people that are just great teachers that have cool signature lessons to think about how they might share that through NCSSM because we all together are going to try to improve math and science education for the state of North Carolina and beyond. So we have some folks that are watching this through a live stream. I will be monitoring the back channel so that if you click on the live chat and you post a question, I will make sure that John gets that question. And beyond that, I'm going to try to chime in if there's anything that I can speak to but John has been teaching with us for years and will introduce himself and has been the primary on this particular presentation. All right? Okay. All right. Very good. I'm John Davis. I'm a biology teacher here. I teach genetics and biotechnology and forensics. And I've also worked here in helping build some of the earlier iterations of our statewide network to share science, math, technology, engineering classes and skills to the great state of North Carolina. I'm also a former student of the School of Science and Math so I have some experience of what was going on here in the 80s. And we'll talk a little bit about the history of science and math and how we're, I think we're well poised to play an important role in scaling STEM statewide and what we've learned from 20 years of distance learning. So let's take a look at our presentation here. So it's a scaling STEM with the NCCCM, building capacity and improving outcomes statewide. As you can see, science and math is here in Durham, North Carolina. And we see ourselves as, well, helping to build a network for science and math education throughout the state. But it's a network that continues on and we're just a small part of it. There are some really interesting local initiatives that I hope to highlight as well. So when we presented this presentation at an in-person conference a few days ago with some educators from around the state and from around the country, we just posed an initial question. One of the things that we want to do is facilitate the distribution of really amazing lessons. We call them signature lessons. These are lessons that a teacher has been developing for years. You know that one or two that you have that you, I should say, that you've loved to teach, maybe it fits a need and you've been developing for a while and you've added enough to it to kind of make it your own intellectual property and that way it would be perfect to share. So I wonder if anyone is connecting in from our chat. We ask the group there, do you have a signature lesson or to think about what a signature lesson is? Maybe at your own school, you know the history teacher, there's one thing that he or she does really well. There's the math teacher, one thing that he or she does really well, among many things of course. Okay. And the folks at Pasqua Tank, if you guys, we're in a live video conference with you so if you want to jump in at any time and ask any questions, just bring yourself off mute and say hello. Gotcha. Okay. Should we ask the gentleman who's here? Sure. Would you like to introduce yourself? Yes. I'm Juan Cho. I teach Air Force Junior ROTC. Oh, okay. Very good. Which we work with quite a bit STEM. Uh-huh. Absolutely. I have a couple of students who actually are at the school now as we speak. Oh. Who came from the school here. So. Oh, that's interesting to make that choice to move from ROTC to a school like ours which doesn't have ROTC, but if they elect to go and do aeronautical engineering, I think they may be well positioned to go into the Air Force Academy from here. And so that's very nice of you to let them go even though they wouldn't have the ROTC experience here because it was better for the students. So that will actually come back to that. And so with the ROTC curriculum, I'm not as familiar with that as I'd like to be. Do you have other areas of the curriculum that you have invented or created that were lacking or that you felt like you had something special to contribute to that that you've developed out yourself? No. Actually, see we have an aerospace science and our leadership as well as a health and wellness as well as drilling ceremonies and our leadership components. So we cover wide spectrum, but again from the STEM perspective, this type of session is good for us because we get input and like I said, as I mentioned, we have students that are at the school now and students in the past that have left here and gone to the school, which we highly encourage them to do that because of the nature of the school and what they're getting out of it. You know, whether they come back to us or not, it's still a bonus for them. Awesome. So we try to get information again collectively across the state and actually see how we can apply that in our curriculum because right now we're an elected course, but we're also trying to implement a ground school certification course. So any feedback and input we can get across the board regardless of the actual course itself is good information for us, but the STEM in particular. Yeah. Well, you know, it's funny because Melissa just in our department just received a grant recently and one come to us to roll out STEM education and we're it's very early in the process, but the fields were, you know, medical technology, agricultural technology, but there is one area. And so we'll be doing, NCSSM will be instrumental in developing some curriculum around aeronautics and security and automation. So more in the mechanical engineering area. So that curriculum may be something that you can tap into and that your school might think about putting in maybe a ninth or 10th grade, some courses that would be elective courses that would build capacity within your school for this type of study. And that's another reason for coming on to the session. The actual network portion of it, because there's things that we don't get to see or when we do get to see them, they're already well on their way, but we're trying to get, you know, other programs that we can actually marry up with ours, you know, exactly. There's several Air Force Junior RTC units in the state of North Carolina, quite a few to be exact. Matter of fact, I think we're probably number two and number three state across the U.S. that have programs. So we're always looking for things new that we can take back to our headquarters and then they can work that and, you know, meet all the state requirements as well as what we require as well. So. And I wonder if we might be able to integrate some of that content as we begin to launch this new curriculum development project because we've been encouraged not to reinvent the wheel. And if there is a significant curriculum materials in these areas that could be a part of that, we may be able to look at your curriculum and then it's really working the network in both directions. Definitely. Definitely. We can talk. All right. Yeah, it sounds good. I mean, that sounds. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's an exciting area to work in. I mean, I think is more automated, you know, aircraft or design. There will need to design an aircraft that can use alternative fuels, you know, Virgin, was it Virgin Atlantic, ran a plane for the first time on biodiesel. So, you know, there's going to be some exciting opportunities for growth for us. But anyway, OK, great. So let me tell you a little bit of a history for all the folks who are out there tuning in about the history of the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics. We're housed in an old hospital in Durham, North Carolina. It used to be the old Watts Hospital. It was built around the turn of the century. And whenever the hospital staff moved up to Durham Regional, the hospital was kind of abandoned and it was purchased by the state in 1980. And a lot of improvements have been made since then. The school was founded right out of Governor Hunt's office. And it was the first statewide residential public high school specializing in science and math, and actually a number of other states across the country. The Illinois schools, Louisiana school, there's one in Texas, South Carolina, built schools based on our model. And our school just enables students to come from, you know, all over the state to one central place. And these are students that are highly motivated and talented in science and mathematics. And we're very fortunate to have them. And we're very fortunate that teacher leaders like yourself keep sending us some great students. So they have a good time when they're here. It's a residential environment. So it's kind of like going off to college a little bit earlier. I've got some pictures here of them showing some school spirit.  We can, we're very fortunate because all the schools, the students are really talented and really motivated. You know, the courses can go pretty quickly. And we can, and a lot of kids come to the school having already done like a little bit of calculus or, you know, having been an accelerated science program. So we can offer some pretty unique courses that they can't find, you know, maybe at their own high school. And these courses, they're places where in faculty can innovate. They can develop new kinds of lessons and roll them out with a student population that's ready to take them. And so I call the NCSSM course catalog a crucible of innovation in content and pedagogy. Some of the courses that we have are math modeling with differential equations, structure and dynamics of modern networks like social networks or computer networks, understanding how they work, climate change biology, looking at not only the mechanism of how, you know, increase CO2 in methane, you know, might be driving climate changes over the next century or so, but how organisms are gonna respond to that as well. Polymer chemistry, which could be anything from DNA to plastics, computational chemistry. This is, you know, using supercomputers to model the interactions of complex three-dimensional molecules, astrophysics and cosmology. And then of course, research courses where students get an opportunity to, you know, to pose a research question, to get the resources to answer it, to develop an experimental design and maybe even publish in a professional journal. So we have a lot of good courses here and of course, we're very eager to share them and we have a history of sharing them. In fact, it's kind of, it's in our mission really. And we feel that it's our responsibility. I mean, all the local communities throughout North Carolina, they send us some of their top students, right? People who might be academic leaders in their own high schools. And, you know, even in this time of where you have lots of testing and, you know, where the schools are being evaluated on how the students are doing, they will send us their best students. And so, you know, we feel compelled to give back. And some of the ways in the past, the school's 25 to 30 years old, the ways we've given back in the first decade of the school or, you know, hosting student workshops on campus during the summer, hosting teacher workshops where teachers can kind of share the latest techniques, tools and techniques in science, math, education. And also some of our faculty here, as you can see, have even written a pre-Cal book that is. So we've written some innovative textbooks out there. But in the mid-90s, we started leveraging the North Carolina Information Highway and started sending out our outreach as, you know, bits of information. So via networks like the one that we're talking on right now. And so this started out with just us broadcasting some of our classes over cable television. Time Warner Cable. You know, you'd be flipping through the channels and there would be, you know, right next to ESPN or something. That would be the School of Science and Math and the teacher would be teaching. And I have one friend who is from that era and he tells me that he's a teacher and he tells me that he'll bump into, he would bump into people at the grocery store and say, oh yeah, I saw one of your psychology classes last night, I thought it was really cool. So wow, talk about being evaluated on your performance as a teacher. But anyway, so then we kind of migrated from that sort of one way teaching via cable TV where then students had to fax their work in to using the internet and the North Carolina information or using the internet to send assignments and the North Carolina information highway to have two-way video conferencing. And of course, this is better because then you can see the students and you can see what they do and they can share their work through a document camera. And it's a lot like just teaching in a conventional classroom except you're kind of looking through kind of what I call a little cloudy window. So we've worked on techniques to try to engage people at a distance and that moved on where that's from there we've moved on to offering not just synchronous courses via video conferencing but courses that are even provided online with lots of asynchronous context where students can access at any time. And this includes things like video physics demonstrations and virtual physics labs. And then we've since moved to try to develop some apps so that students can learn wherever they are even riding the bus around from their smartphone. So we're just trying to get our programs out there. And so here's this big family tree. I don't know if I'll go into a lot of great detail but we started out with the residential classes that led to summer workshops for teachers and teacher collaborations that we now conduct via video conference. We've also as I said taught on cable TV and led to video conferencing and web conferencing. We have students doing independent research and then our summer workshops they'll come and work with us. We've developed content like textbooks that's become virtual labs that we're now kind of breaking up and distributing as learning objects. So this would be videos and animations and pictures that are all kind of atomized so you can use them if you want in your class or if you want to tie them together into a big lesson we'll provide lesson plans as well as two. And so these virtual labs and learning objects enabled us to roll out NTSSM online and in rolling out NTSSM online a lot of our teachers have had to learn how to teach into a computer and capture that lesson and provide it in a way that it can be scaled and shared broadly. So this has led to a wide use of blended learning which is where you're basically your class is not necessarily just, how should I say you're integrating asynchronous elements into your regular classes. So, and then the flipped classroom where the flipped classroom is where teachers who would normally say lecture and provide demonstrations during class and then give the kids homework to do at night but they would actually record some of those lectures and some of those demonstrations into a computer and then the students would watch those at night on their own time and then the class time could be then better used to do problem solving, more labs or working on specific issues in the students' learning. So this is kind of a family tree that shows how we've been trying a bunch of different approaches and these approaches have been evolving and from one to another. I can't help it, I'm a biology teacher, so. Okay, so, what have we learned from 20 years of distance learning? I won't go over this whole exhaustive list, it's not a very good way to provide information but we've just learned a couple of interesting little tricks and just probably more of these out there but we like for our instructors to be creative and to develop their own stuff. We wanna try to use a medium like this to promote engaging dialogue at a distance and I hope being in the conference, you feel that that's the case. We use a lot of learning management systems like Blackboard and Moodle. We leverage the web as much as possible using all the wide variety of stuff that's out there and we wanna then kinda stuff every channel that we can find. So we're going to publish a lot of our stuff on YouTube with any learning object repository we find, the iTunes, iTunes University. We basically wanna put our stuff out there and just see through Darwinian selection which lives and which dies and hopefully we'll be on, we will have, as you say, we'll have found a good horse to bet on in all these channels I hear. And of course we're building our own learning object repositories as well. We of course we look for independent students. We're not opposed to actually like rolling out equipment in the aughts, we got a big grant to build cyber campuses downstream and I think that, well, the school right in the same county as Pasquitank High School, North Eastern High, have you ever been over to their distance learning room? Yes. Yeah, so we help them build that and kinda figure out the kind of furniture that can be used. And we made these not only just like a receiving in for some of our content, but a place where students could come and work collaboratively on projects and students could train teachers and kinda promote professional development throughout the school. We try to, as much as possible, enrich distance learning with face-to-face experiences. I've been kinda reading the news lately and kinda trying to keep up with, some of the trends in education and there are a lot of online programs that are rolling out there in the state and across the country. And a lot of them have been criticized because they're not that engaging. Students just go on, do some reading, do some homework, watch a few videos maybe, and then participate in a discussion board and they're not engaged as much as they would be in a normal classroom. Well, we wanna try to bring the level of engagement up to something like a normal classroom. So what we do in our online program is even though our students are all around the state taking the course online, we try to bring them to the campus quite a bit. We bring them to campus in the summer. We use web conferencing frequently. That works a lot like video conferencing here, but it's more Skype-like to meet with the students as much as we can. So, and one thing that we've learned in our virtual labs is it's difficult for us to like send an entire lab full of equipment out to a student at a distance. So if we can't do that, we'll try to bring them to campus as much as we can. Okay, and if we can't bring them to campus enough, we realize that the analytical work that they're doing is almost as important maybe as using the physical tools. That is, you know, you may, in doing a lab, what's kind of, what may be most important is collecting the data and analyzing it as well as learning how to use a pipette or a burette or, you know, a hot plate or whatever. Okay, so let me show an example of that. This is from our chemistry teacher who has developed some virtual labs that are provided not via animations but via video. This is Guido Gabrielli. Today we're going to do a magnesium hydrochloric acid lab. It's about three things. It's about verifying the molar relationship between the magnesium and hydrochloric acid in terms of hydrogen gas produced. It is also about determining the volume of an ideal gas and determining the value of the, of R, the gas constant. Okay, so first we will tear the rainboat. Now, one thing that's interesting about this lab is that the students have to collect the information themselves. Now they don't have, they can't afford an analytical balance but we can do a little bit of the lab for them and they'll collect that data and then use that in their computations. And as you can see here, matches the atmospheric pressure outside. And now the two liquids are at the same level. Okay, so the student would then need to collect that little bit of data there. So no, they didn't get their hands on, you know, the pipette or beer ad, they didn't get their hands on the analytical balance but they're doing all the work anyway. They're doing all the analytical work anyway. Okay, all right, so I'll talk about like one of my signature lessons and we don't, we don't just invent everything here. We're not like, there was that old phrase about Apple, you know, back in the 80s or something if it did, they've Apple didn't invent it, they weren't gonna use it and they got, they got criticized for that. So I, you know, like to use other folks resources as well and kind of remix it. And so this is a project that's put out by sciencecourseware.org, which is a collaboration between California State University and the National Science Foundation. And it's basically a virtual fruit fly lab. I can't send flies out through the mail and that takes two weeks to breed a whole generation anyway. So if I can do it virtually, then we can go through a whole bunch of labs, a whole bunch of trials and we can learn Mendelian genetics, you know, in just a couple of days. So the idea here is you go online, you choose your flies, you allow them to breed with one another and then, you know, you look at them as if you were looking at them under an actual de-secting scope. And I don't know if you guys remember doing genetics back in the day, but you look at the numbers of offspring and you use this to understand sort of the trade, the how the alleles are being inherited across the generations. So students will then screen cap their results, put those into a lab notebook and then send those back to me. So I like using virtual labs quite a bit and there's a lot of great stuff that's being put out by public television, Discovery Channel, all kinds of different university programs, other high schools like us and, you know, why should we reinvent the wheel if we can already find a couple of things out there and sort of remix them for our own classes. And we wanna share our stuff so other people can remix our stuff as well. Now, I have students send me stuff via screenshots. This is actually kind of useful. That button right there is neat because when students are out there roaming around and doing stuff on the web, they can just take a quick screenshot of what they're doing, embed that into a Word document and send that off to me. Some people get this confused with screen recordings and you'll see why I'm bringing this transition in a minute. There are a variety of tools so that teachers, anything that they're doing online, they can capture really quickly. And these tools are free. This one software here, Camtasia Studio, it's a great tool and it's probably the most popular out there but it costs $150 for one seat. But you can use Cam Studio, which is an open source version of that. If you have like a Windows XP machine, if you have a nicer machine running Windows 7 or so, you can use Microsoft Expression Encoder which will not only capture video but allow you to put it together in an entire sort of a silver light package that's very interactive. Or if you're using a Mac, you can use QuickTime Player. And I like to call this skill of a teacher that wherein anything that they're doing on their computer, they can immediately create a video of an asynchronous fluency. So here we teach, I'm teaching off a computer right now. I should be able to capture this on my computer and create a video in a hurry and then have that out to my students at a remote location. And a lot of teachers are doing this. I was just at my leadership class a couple of nights ago and a teacher who's on maternity leave was doing this and then uploading this to YouTube or a website. So even though she had a sub, she could keep teaching a couple of important concepts that she didn't trust the sub to do at a distance. So anyway, one thing that I like to do since I teach biology and biology involves the relationship of structure and function at very small details, you can see in some of my sources here, I like to kind of zoom around. And so for all you teachers out here, here's a little bit of a trick. If you're teaching this way, you can save your PowerPoint as a PDF file and that'll enable you to zoom around and fly around inside it and take a good look at detail in the slide. So this is me talking. And in interface. And that's me talking as well. DNA is duplicated. So that's one of my presentations. Now, let's see, by using these learning objects, these recorded presentations, these virtual, some of these virtual labs, but in creating a blended learning or a flipped classroom context, our teacher, Mr. Gabrielli, has actually found that some of his AP scores have actually been improving by not spending so much time in class lecturing, but spending more of that time problem solving and doing labs and having the students watch the lecture after class when they can pause it, they can rewind it and back it up. He's actually found that it's been working out pretty well and his AP scores have been going up. So we're excited about this potential technique. Let's see. You know, I would wanna just share a couple of other signature lessons that I've been working on. This is one that exemplifies bringing a lot of stuff from a variety of sources and how it's been developed by our colleagues to develop a great lesson. Some of my students really like to hear the history of humanity, how we all, you know, our ancestors were a small population of humans living in Africa and then dispersed around the world over the past 60,000 years and we can trace that with DNA, but they're always interested, and they're of course interested in knowing how you actually trace that information with DNA, how we can still see in our genomes today this information. So I start out on my Brain Honey site, which is our course website, just, you know, allowing them to compare DNA sequences from different ethnic groups around the world and to look for unique markers. And, you know, made this in, you know, 10 or 15 minutes and then they then take that and make simple family trees that kind of resemble these that show sort of divergence over time. Then we move on from humans to lemurs and one of the resources that we have nearby is the Duke Lemur Center, where they have these amazingly rare lemurs, but even if students at a distance can't get to there, we show, I show videos and have lots of other content to help them learn more about the lemurs and then they download the lemur DNA from this website here, that the National Center for Biotechnology Information and then use supercomputer programs to put these lemurs into a phylogenetic tree. So this lesson actually was partially developed by me, but also started by some of my colleagues and each of us have been taking it and updating it and sort of remixing it and then kind of moving it forward. So it's a signature lesson of multiple people. Another one is the Hominid Skull Lab. I hosted a workshop where I bought a bunch of skulls for teachers who were interested in human history and they kind of look like this one here I have in my hand. I guess you can go to the full screenshot here, Dan. But these cost about $300 a piece and then I sent them out with all the teachers. By the way, that's a tip. If you want to have teachers come to your workshops, make sure that you send them home with something better than like bookmarks and pens and eraser stuff, send them with some good stuff like digital cameras and iPads and all that stuff, if you can get it in your budget.  But anyway, so I realized that I had this great resource as you can see on here my computer of all these skulls in one place but they were all gonna be dispersed. So I had our photographer on campus take pictures of these from a variety of different angles and then he animated them in flash. And so there's a lot of really great tools out there that make it easier to share things from the real world online. And these tools are getting easier and easier to develop. So now we can actually study hominid skulls virtually.  It's called STEM at NCSSM. And we've had a number of these efforts before but we're kind of aggregating everything together. We're organizing it. Melissa is a, she was a librarian way back in the day. She's still a librarian way back in the day even.  Librarian is your librarian for life now. And we have so much content and every teacher just like at your school I'm sure your teachers have many different places that they like to put content up on the web whether it's wiki spaces or blogs or Google sites or any of those sites. Our teachers are just like that and they have stuff everywhere. So we're trying to use the STEM at NCSSM as a portal to launch out and to make searchable all this content. We've got significant STEM content in their math lots of secondary math and science content as well as a lot of other odds and ends that we'll share with you a few of those featured items. And we just got started on this. So right now it's primarily chemistry, physics and then secondary mathematics. So but we're building it. Yeah, but and this would be the location where some of those aerospace engineering materials would be. Oh absolutely. We will have a full blown as we develop about the curriculum for the state in applied sciences everything we create every element of it and then whole modules. So it might be like just a video or just an image or an applet or some sort of a little animation. And you might just grab that piece and take it and run with it and do a lesson or put it into your online course or put it into your website that you have or you may use the entire module that we created a whole lesson or unit. And I'm going to talk a little bit later about how we're interested in collecting stuff from our partners to feature. And of course we realize that we're not the only game in town. We take our stuff and put our stuff on YouTube and iTunes U and hopefully even if we work through those channels those channels will continue to attract people back to our site. So the whole web is just a click away. Why not use it? Okay so let's see. Now we also just don't do STEM. We don't do STEM types of blended learning or flip classroom. We actually have a music teacher who has found it's been really useful to provide basic music lessons to the students and then the students can work on those on their own time and then they'll come together and work together. This is actually a bossa nova rhythm. I'll play the straight A style for you and I might pop a couple of little chromatic transitions in as well so you can see what I might do if I was playing a bossa rhythm with a drummer. Drum on his laptop there. B flat. All right so as you can see he actually teaches violin or he plays, well I don't know he's the number one instrument is violin but he also plays the piano and the drums and the guitars and et cetera and we have, you know, there's only two music teachers and we've got a lot of students here at the School of Science and Math who teach music and so this is a great way for those teachers to get a lot of their basic instruction kind of out of the way offline. All right so I wanted to facilitate this discussion as much as we can about what makes a signature lesson because we not only want to feature those but we want to feature yours as well. Do you, let's see is there any, I wonder if there's anyone? I mean I can start a little bit. You know when I was in the media center at the high school I was supporting every discipline at a very large high school and so I saw what teachers were up against and in some cases they had to start from scratch to create their own lesson because A the textbook didn't cover something in depth enough it didn't line up with the state's curriculum. Perhaps they had a handful of students in their class who were struggling to effectively understand a concept so the lessons that they had used in previous years were insufficient. Sometimes they had an influx of students that were different learners. Perhaps they had always done something that was very visual and then they ended up with some people who were needed more hands on. So there's a lot of reasons why people develop signature lessons and my observations over the years were that the people who did the most, one of the real key pieces is what is it that you geek out over? Like what do you think is the reason why you study whatever you studied? So if you're a political science civics teacher, my husband's a civics teacher and he has been studying political science and he has to teach economics, political science as well as the legal system but he is a political scientist and he loves to the American government topics and so forth so he has created some lessons that put the students at the center of the activity because he just was mystified by why the students were not engaged when he was talking about like voting and how do we get the vote out? Because this is one of the most important things that you're gonna do, you're gonna become a contributing citizen now in the world so don't you want to make sure you get the vote out? And so he would put the kids in that situation, do some problem solving and his lessons were born of need because the kids were not engaged and until you made it relevant to them, they did not get engaged. So I would argue that what makes a signature lesson to some extent is just straight out need. The kids aren't getting it so if anybody has any contributions that they'd like to put up in the chat window or if I'm a live audience, interactive audience, I'd love to hear from you. Now that we've been talking about it a little bit more, is there been a signature lesson in your aerospace science classes that where you can really leverage what your own experience is and this is what you can bring to the course that you really like teaching? Well, what I've been working at, I've been trying to get an online ground school certification course. There's quite a few out there. Ground school, correct? Ground school. Ground school. It's a prerequisite for getting your pilot's license. Oh, ground school. Okay. Ground school. So before you even take off in the plane, you need to know, you need to have some mastery of everything. Well, I would hope so. Absolutely, absolutely. And I mean, there's a lot of programs out there, but again, under the parameter, excuse me, under the umbrella of junior RTC, we have a lot of assets that we have access to that are free and open to the school system as well. And as I mentioned before, there's several units out there and I can't speak for any of the other units, but there's things that I've been trying to do since I've been here. And again, program isn't new. There's nothing new about what's going on. It's just, again, finding that networking process of who I need to talk to and where because I came here from Maryland and I was in close proximity to one of the local universities. And I had my juniors and seniors matriculating at the junior senior year right into the aviation program. And we had a similar thing here. And as well, I worked with NASA and that program K through 12, fifth graders that could tell you anything about the plan of the Mars. So again, we'll definitely talk offline because there's some things that we're trying to implement here in relation to that. And there is a curriculum in place now up in your area, but it's individualized and specific to that school. And I had not had the opportunity to talk to those folks that had that program in place. But I had kind of ventured around. As a matter of fact, I just came back, I took some students to Singapore. Wow. In November, December in the realm of aviation, but the junior RKC cadets from four different states. So it's a matter of venturing out, but again, coming back to North Carolina. And again, everybody may not want to be on board with it, but I'm looking for the students we have here because you're saying everything for what I've seen here is definitely neat, basically. But we're trying to figure out a good starting point to make that happen, but they have to have that background as well, that history.  We always use him for aerial photos. So he might be someone to contact. Fabulous, fabulous. Well, we will. Anyway, so you can see these kind of conversations lead to, these things lead to more conversations later off the line. Get up with this via email. All right. I'll probably be paying you a visit here shortly. That'd be awesome. Excellent. That'd be awesome. Yeah, so I just wanted to talk about what we want to provide. I mean, we're going to keep teaching classes here at the university. I mean, here at the school, let's take a look at our presentation. And we're also bringing in a diverse bunch of kids from around the state. As you can see here, they're all wearing their home school colors on our online program. We're going to roll out our learning object repository. We're going to keep doing video conferencing. If you want to know how to subscribe to NCSSM video conferencing courses, just take a look at our website. It's at www.dlt.ncssm.edu. And I will show you what that URL looks like right here. There it is. Dlt.ncssm.edu. And you can click on Interactive Video Conferencing. There's a video how it works. There's a course catalog and information about how to register. So we developed that on a school-by-school basis. That is, we might have two or three students at a particular school meet with us. We can usually meet with about four or five classrooms at a time. But even for schools who don't have the fancy video conferencing equipment that's used in distance education, the codecs and all that, there are actually a number of clients that can connect to us via, or I should say students that can connect to us through PC or even iPads. So we're taking more singletons on in our courses, as well as a small classroom full of students. So, OK, let's see. Moving on, of course, we're continuing to offer our summer programs. And we don't just want to provide some professional development and then walk away. We don't develop relationships with people. And so this may involve some year-long collaborations to tie all these programs together and where some of our attendees might feed back into the system. So we have our learning opportunity that we've talked about. And we do have pretty ambitious goals. I mean, we want to reach a million students in North Carolina. And that includes, what was it, 100,000 teachers? 100,000 teachers and a million students is the goal. And that's within the next five years. And in addition to that, which I think is even, in some ways, more audacious, we want to make sure that we have relationships with school systems, the majority of school systems, and each of our 13 congressional districts. And so that requires somebody on the other end who we are in conversation with about what the needs are and trying to find ways that we can try to help improve outcomes for those school systems, in addition to reaching individuals through our digital assets and our professional development courses. So we ultimately want to grow beyond North Carolina while recognizing, of course, that the North Carolinians and their tax dollars are supporting all of our programs across the state. We want to build local capacity, as Melissa mentioned. And we want to kind of promote this idea of open source education, which you've probably picked up, is that we think that educational resources should be freely available. And people should have the opportunity to remix them in their own creative ways while attributing the source of those. And we want to promote best practices for STEM. Because we realize, I mean, ultimately in the long term, the way that the state and the nation is going to emerge out of our current economic crisis, right? This long, jobless recovery from this great financial crisis we had a few years ago is to innovate, to develop new types of industries, develop. And that's going to require lots of students who are trained in STEM education. So finally, we're just going to ask anyone out there, what can your NCSSM do for you? That is, what can we do for you as your statewide science and math and technology school? Or what can organizations like ours do for you? What are your needs? And we've heard from folks from outside. Yeah, and I have a question that's been raised in the stream, which is, are you just focusing on the high school level? And what we have been doing is we have been providing professional development in all of secondary. I think that with our math and essential standards trainings and a lot of the work that we do with teachers that we could be working with teachers in upper elementary through middle school and then into the high school. As far as creating curriculum materials, we do primarily focus in the high school region of the curriculum because that is where we live. However, we do enrichments with our younger children. These enrichments are either, there's a number of different ways these are delivered. And this is something that we're working on trying to improve. When we first started with the video conferencing, we were providing enrichments live like this where people could, you know, the students in the classroom can interact with the presenters. Sometimes the presenters are faculty, sometimes there are high school students and they would do activities with elementary kids. We're also looking at modifying that model so that we can reach more kids because a lot of people don't have access to video conferencing. And so we wanna make sure that we use web conferencing software for some of this delivery and also create some digital materials. So if you contact us and say, you know what, my kids are struggling with this particular strand of mathematics and I'm a fourth grade teacher, that's the feedback we need. We need to know what's hard to teach. What do you wish you had access to? And so elementary materials, we can create as well, but we need better information from the field about sort of how we need to ramp up our services for younger children. So that's something that I would strongly recommend that if you are working at a younger level, that you would contribute by telling us what kinds of topics you wish that you had access to more robust learning materials and let us start working on that for you. So and let me share with you our contact information so that if you have any questions afterwards, we'd be glad to address those. As Melissa mentioned, you know, we have some ideas about how to leverage the strengths we have here among our faculty, but we're always eager to grow and try to solve problems that we haven't yet anticipated out there from the state of North Carolina and abroad. So if there's any other questions or any follow-up? Well, thank you for sharing your afternoon with us. And like I said, we're really looking forward to establishing new partnerships for the 21st century. All right, looking forward to hearing from you. Thank you. Thank you. Bye-bye. All right, take care.


Thanks for meeting up with me. It's nice to finally meet you and have an actual date together. You're not a serial killer, are you? Of course not. Jesus, why would you even say that? Uh, I-I don't know. I-I watched this Lifetime movie last night, and the main character chick goes out on a date with a serial killer, but-but she didn't know he was an actual killer, and she didn't find out until it was, like, too late, you know? Uh, I don't know what to say. It's just a movie. It wasn't real. Uh, actually, it was based on a true story. Oh, well, jeez, that's horrible. Uh, you-you are the kidnapper, are you? Of course I'm not. No. Oh, uh, hold on. I-I gotta answer this call. If I don't answer it, they're gonna send a search party for me. Okay, no problem. You can answer it. Uh, hey, Ashley. Yeah, I'm actually still alive. No, he hasn't killed me yet. Okay, well, I'll text you if I end up in his trunk. Okay, thanks for checking in. Bye.  Oh, uh, we just check in on each other when we date guys that we meet online. It's nothing personal. Oh, okay, no worries. I guess I understand. It's my friend Michelle calling. I-I gotta take this call. All right, go ahead. Uh, hey, Michelle. Oh, no, he hasn't kidnapped me yet. Okay, I'll let you know if he pulls out a knife or anything. Uh, okay, bye. Dude, do you really think that I'm gonna hurt you? Wait, who said anything about hurting me? Is that what you're thinking about right now? Are you gonna hurt me? No, I just, uh, I gotta go. Thanks for taking the time to hang out, but uh, I gotta go.


UC Berkeley is the world's premier public research university. I'm Sean Burns. I direct the Office of Undergraduate Research and Scholarships. What we try to do is engage undergraduates in that research enterprise, supporting them financially and intellectually to carry out their own projects that they're passionate about. There are thousands of undergraduates at UC Berkeley from every major engaged in research. Science is 100% inspired by my dance background. There's this idea in some circles of science that the brain actually evolved for movement in the first place. So when you're looking at how training movement changes how you think about things, you might be scratching at the surface of very fundamental ways that the brain operates. My name is Alyssa Stover and I'm a psychology major at Berkeley. I decided, okay, neuroscience lab, I want to do that kind of research. My name is Ifetriku Okeke. I'm from Nigeria. I ended up being privileged enough to move to the United States when I was 16 years old to start community college. That was a really rough transition, mostly because I had no family with me. Another two-week engineering company. My brother having him come live with me was a big priority. Times negative. I am acting up behalf of my parents as his parent in the U.S. In my life at UC Berkeley, we're studying dopaminergic neurons, which are implicated in a host of diseases like autism spectrum disorder and Parkinson's and an addiction. I didn't think that much about doing science, but it blew me away. When you get to see, you know, your experiment work, you're like, I'm the first in the world to see that. Wow. My name is Ian Taylor. Growing up, I played about every sport there is and I would come home and after dinner when I was getting ready for bed, I would often just crack open a textbook and start reading about biology or chemistry. And so being able to come to Berkeley and immerse myself in a research lab, studying molecular neuroscience has really helped me solidify my choice to go into scientific research as a career. My name is Raul Varela. I started recording albums and then I started touring. So I've been touring for 17, 18 years now. I wanted to go back to school and really learn how to use the methodology of anthropology in documentary filmmaking. What I am to do with my documentary is to help the community where I grew up. I grew up in Ciudad Juarez in Mexico. There was a problem that's been going on for the last 25 years, but young women have been murdered or disappeared. My sister at the time was probably like 16. So that's why she, my mom decided to bring my sister first and then me. A lot of people when they come from a place where that's similar to where I have come from, they forget about that stuff. So I don't want to do that. Keep aiming with your hand toward the blue target. What's exciting about these undergraduate research projects is it enables students to deeply pursue an issue that's of concern to them. And that's an age-old ideal of liberal education. I'm working on an ion channel in particular whose loss of function is thought to be involved in the onset of migraines with aura in humans. Being able to take such excellent coursework and take those fundamental principles and apply them firsthand quite literally is really just amazing. Our lab studies how the brain controls the body. It brought together so many interesting questions I had about dance and myself. How does your brain make your body do these complicated movements? And how training your body to do those things can relate to other parts of your cognition. So the end result of all of our studies is we can help people who have Parkinson's or who've had a stroke. In terms of theory, we can understand very deep processes that the brain is carrying out to help you navigate your world. I've been thinking about this project for a number of years. With the help of the undergrad research fund, I'm able to actually make these a reality. My name is Gloria Brar. Did you make any point mutations? I think that first experience and research at Berkeley set me on my path to eventually becoming a faculty member here at Berkeley. We should know pretty soon whether the structure is important. That'll be really exciting. They provide a stipend to work over the summer and being able to work full time really can allow you to transition into thinking like a scientist. It's a tremendous learning opportunity. We're very much allowed to take on our own research projects and be able to follow them throughout the duration of our time here as students. And that's something that's very unique about this school. Research opened a whole new body of knowledge and also a way of thinking about knowledge to me. Trying to reconcile with the other stuff you just mentioned where attention doesn't have any effect. Yes, so maybe... Critical thinking skills are a huge part of research. I mean really being able to logically wrap your head around some sort of argument. For me being in classical ballet, you're taught these are the rules. Don't really question them. Gaining the confidence to question things. How is this a novel take on college? After being told my whole life, don't question, was huge. It has been life changing. Being given a chance to take part in and be a part of endeavors that are essentially creating new knowledge. It's just been great privilege. I want to know how it's going to affect your life because that's really what it's supposed to be about. My name is Andy Goldfarb. My wife Denise and I fund undergraduate research. What's the essence of what I'm doing? And that's what people really want to hear. There's nothing like it to be able to sit with recipients, the jewels of Berkeley, and see how they come alive, how they grow, where they're going. Getting to know them a little bit, you're going to find that it's the best feedback that you could possibly get for how you've invested your dollars. The skills you've gained ultimately translate and carry on to push you and propel you even further. Now I work at UCSF in an epilepsy research lab. I'm studying epilepsy in zebrafish. The goal is to find drug targets to cure and treat epilepsy. What's the big takeaway from this with respect to the protocol? We're able to see the base pairs. Especially for first generation and underrepresented students, the relationships that they build through these undergraduate research projects change the course of their lives.  My mentor is Ray Teyes. He's in the ethnic studies department. Ray has a lot of experience, many decades of documentary filmmaking. That's the best way to shoot that. You know, it's more natural. I have the support of somebody that's done this many, many times. This is a big advantage. I'm living soon and I will be spending five weeks filming, doing interviews. This opportunity means a lot to me because this is something that I never thought I was going to achieve. By utilizing these resources and these people here, you realize that everything is possible. UC Berkeley is a really important vehicle for social mobility in this society. And I've come to believe that undergraduate research experiences are the most potent fuel for that vehicle. Who has made those connections? Yeah, how are you going to make those connections? UROC is the underrepresented researchers of color. When students hear there's a community of underrepresented researchers, they light up because they're like, wow, okay, there is a space made specifically for me that's saying you're valued and I want to see you succeed. And we're going to succeed together. I'm also a first generation college student, so I had no idea anything about science. I go home and I talk to my parents about my research and they're like, I have no idea what you're talking about. I have been food insecure and housing insecure. So somebody told you, not only are you doing research, it's a job where your time is compensated and you don't need to worry about where you're going to get your next meal or how you're going to pay your next rent. And that just expands how many people could see themselves in research. So yes, funding is super important. What we're seeing is students arriving that want to tackle important social questions in their time here. What role does healing play in transforming the lives of black girls? What are the possibilities and limitations of popular music as a vehicle for social transformation? How can understanding the misogyny of ancient Rome help us to define and debate the gender biases we confront today? How can we use both frogs and CRISPR-Cas9 to further investigate the genetic and molecular basis of autism? If you listen to these students and what they're doing and the things they're researching, you're talking about changes in the world and that's really what Berkeley's legacy should be and has been for so long. I think it's so fundamentally changed my experience here and has given me so much that it's hard to imagine my life without it now. Being immersed in it is, I can describe it as nothing else other than unreal. It seems unreal. Aim to engage in research because it's part of our educational experience. It should be part of everyone's educational experience. At least try it out and then if it's not for you, it's not for you, but I highly recommend it. Eyes look kind of shifting.


Students, when they come into my courses, and again, they're mostly 400 level courses, they've recognized that the content that they're learning in other classes does not add up in a cohesive, straightforward way to a simple understanding of the world. They're savvy to the, for example, the idea that the types of insights they're going to learn in an economics course are fundamentally different from the types of insights they're going to get from a sociology or social justice course. And so my goal is to give them a structured environment where they can think about where, I guess, disciplined insights coming from those different perspectives can come together and inform their understanding of a real world situation. So they are already aware that the world is complex and messy, and anything I can give them in terms of a framework to make sense of that, I would say is a net benefit. Some disciplines, there's an easy way to imagine that my approach to critical thinking that I use in environmental studies would directly apply. For example, in journalism, I would think that it would be a goal to help students to uncover multiple layers to a story, multiple framings that stakeholders might bring to understand what's going on in a situation. And I would think that the students would benefit from a structured introduction to that through some case studies in a classroom setting such that they're prepared to recognize that complexity in the real world when they're out doing their journalistic work. Any single discipline does not provide a comprehensive understanding of how the world works and that students would benefit from the opportunity to learn at least the basic level insights from other disciplines and the occasional complex relationships between the types of understandings they would get from different disciplines.