Alumni Connections: From Bristle Bots to Jumping Robots
November 2022
While studying at Cal, Justin Yim was an integral part of building Salto, the jumping robot. In his off time, Justin did science outreach with CRS on campus as a Steering Committee member and in the community, leading BASIS lessons to local elementary students.
Now an Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Science and Engineering Department at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Justin uses that same inspiration teaching grad students about robot design!
What inspired you to do outreach with CRS?
As an elementary school and high school student, I got excited about STEM through activities like robotics competitions. As a student researcher in robotics, I wanted to share some of that excitement with current K-12 students! I started participating in K-12 outreach during my research as an undergraduate student and was glad to be able to get involved as a graduate student through CRS's programs.
STEM outreach is a great opportunity for graduate students to change gears and interact with folks they otherwise might not see frequently. Young students' energy and joy is contagious! And teaching lessons to elementary school students -- rather than university students -- helped me hone my communication clarity and flexibility.
- Justin Yim
What is one moment from teaching with CRS that you'll always remember?
One of my favorite lessons to teach was the Robots that Run module for 3rd graders. Students modified a finger-sized "bristle bot" toys inspired by bugs to help them navigate walls or wrestle each other. Students really got creative with all sorts of headgear from unicorn horns and antlers to spirals and more. In a particularly memorable instance, one student discovered her long antennae could get her bug to do spinning headstands. What really impressed me though, was when she and her neighbor got her neighbor's bug headspinning too! They figured out their trick well enough to reproduce their results.
What "Openings" have occurred in your life from studying science and/or participating in our community outreach programs?
In college, I picked up an odd fondness for the programming language Matlab used by scientists and engineers. I particularly love to use it for creative projects outside of work. I hooked up a model airplane remote control to my laptop's audio jack to fly a Matlab flight simulator and built a spectrogram to help me transcribe music. My grad school friend and I applied Matlab to analyze written style in fiction. We had so much fun chatting about authors and plotting statistics about their styles that we stayed up trading plots and data until past 1:30 in the morning -- and now we're getting married next summer!
How has your volunteering and training with CRS helped you in your continued participation in outreach?
I have worked with my lab at Carnegie Mellon to develop lesson plans with a community non-profit in the Pittsburgh area teaching girls about Computer Aided Design (CAD). Volunteering and training with CRS gave me the framework for how to structure lessons and organize volunteer teams.
What is one thing, if anything, that you took from your volunteering experience that you continue to use in your work?
My volunteering experience provided me with so many memories, skills, and connections! As the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science outreach coordinator, I developed spreadsheets and scripts to help me organize the half-dozen teams of volunteers each semester. I imagined I'd use these computer tools a few times and that would be it, but I've actually adapted them for organizing multiple different kinds of teams and meetings since!
Why do you think it is important for graduate students in STEM fields to do science education outreach with students at local schools?
Graduate student STEM outreach offers unique and valuable opportunities that young students at local schools and graduate student volunteers would seldom find elsewhere! For young students, programs like CRS's provide an unparalleled opportunity to experience hands-on science and discovery with real researchers working on today's unanswered questions in science and engineering.
I hope that students see not just the excitement and variety of scientific studies, but if studying STEM is something they want to pursue. I think teams of multiple volunteers together can be particularly impactful both by providing more individual one-on-one time connecting with each student and by showing students that scientists can study, look like, and be many different things!