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(NASA, part 3)  I met Punya Gupta and Tanmay Gupta a few years ago when both of them were in high school. At the time, Punya had messaged someone at Brandeis through LinkedIn and they forwarded her to me since I do alot of educational outreach with high school students (I am a former high school teacher). Back then, COVID was in full swing and so we met through Zoom for a year. I started, as usual, with teaching them how to do literature review and how to brainstorm a rigorous idea that has never been published on before. During that time they also became founding members of a human augmentation virtual group (TRIG)  that I organize and that is open to everyone (I’ll put the link below).  

Many students give up after a year of rigorous literature review but Tanmay and Punya were so self driven that they flourished and eventually we came up with an idea of disassembling a drone and using the motors to provide unique cues to people as they tried to balance.  To build this device, we got help from Ian Roy and Tim Hebert, and they learned how to solder, how to interface the Arduino with an IMU and the drone motors, how to program and link the arduino to Matab and Python. By the end of it, they knew how to build the device way beyond my knowledge and skill level! They were asking questions on message boards and figuring everything out by themselves! When Brandeis opened up, they ran a study and even got significant results!

For the NASA conference, since there was greater interest for vibrotactile feedback, Punya and Tanmay started a whole new literature review and discovered that there were very few studies looking at vibrotactile feedback to help postural balancing in the presence of growing fatigue. So they designed an experiment to explore that and they also brainstormed a novel feedback signal from the vibrotactors! When they came to the NASA conference to present their work I was so impressed by their confidence and ability to convey the details and nuance of their experiments as very intelligent and accomplished people listened to their work and asked good and tough questions.

This has also been part of a larger type of educational outreach that I have been exploring.  Right before COVID hit, Marisa Maddox and I created and taught a full course on research at Waltham High School where students learned to conduct literature review and then use that to collaboratively brainstorm rigorous ideas that have not been published on.  These students also then conducted experiments.  It was pretty epic and an example of how capable high school students are.  I really think every high school should have a research component where the students are contributing to research. 

https://sites.google.com/brandeis.edu/trig/