| Analyzing Earnings and Savings Data
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You are a high school student working a part time job. You want to save up for something cool, but you also have expenses. Using a dataset of earnings and expenses, predict how long it will take you to save up enough money to get the thing you want. |
| Clean Water Pollution with Photocatalytic Habitats
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Wallum Lake in Douglas, MA has been polluted with PFAs. The local conservation commission has requested your guidance to help engineer a way to reduce the pollutant in Wallum Lake. Studies on this new chemical called a photocatalyst show promising results and may be useful to you. Your task is to:
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| Do You Use Batteries?
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How many batteries do you use on a daily basis? How many battery powered devices do you encounter? What do you do with your dead batteries? The proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) devices will create a need for an enormous amount of batteries which will need to be disposed of as hazardous waste. You, as a research scientist, must design a way to power a device without using batteries, write a Python program to create a dataset harvested from a radiofrequency energy harvesting testbed and prepare a poster of your research to present to faculty and graduate students. |
| From Field to Future: Navigating Climate Challenges in Agriculture
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You are a farmer and over the past several years you have noticed several challenges to ensuring the survival of your farm. You have seen more struggles with planting times, irrigation, and keeping crops alive with the hotter temperatures. With some investigation you have found the challenges you are facing are due to an increase in global temperatures, severe weather events, and droughts. Propose a solution to save your farm from one of the issues that have arisen due to climate change! |
| Green Energy = Safe (Classroom) Environment
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There is a lot of waste in landfills that comes from food waste and green waste, and we need to be able to remove it. Your task is to perform a separation technique – chromatography, to find out which chemicals are in your waste and then determine if there any applications where we can use this. Students will be given a mystery green waste, use techniques to identify pigments, then using their knowledge of polarity, determine the polarity of the components in the mixture. Thereafter, students will identify further questions to research or make recommendations on sustainable alternatives to deal with green waste or other types of waste. |
| Homeostasis and MCAS Review
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This unit is framed around a central question: “What happens when an organism is not in homeostasis?” All activities tied into this central question were then linked to a real-world problem, the effects of vaping on health. The culminating activity was a lab visit from WPI staff (or the lab performed independently) and having students perform lab tests on C. elegans, similar to those teachers in the RET program performed over the summer of 2024. As a hook, students were shown data and the final poster presentation gathered from the RET summer program, and considered how the effects of vaping on microscopic worms might be applied to human health and how future learning/review could inform our understanding of the impact of vaping on health. |
| Inside the Sensor: How Physics Powers Blood Oxygen Monitoring
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Students are introduced to the importance of blood oxygen testing. Students will learn about how the COVID-19 crisis affected hospitals and highlight the importance of newly updated biomedical devices. They will also be introduced to the current need for widely translated informative posters in hospitals and will create a poster that can be placed on a hospital room wall that explains how Transcutaneous Blood Oxygen Sensors work. |
| Leaving Our World Better Than We Found It: Join the Movement!
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The students will take on the role of an environmental scientist who is researching an area of the world, focusing on the major sources of pollution and the impact humans have on the environment in that area. Using the background research and infographic created, the student is charged with developing a public service announcement to the public about using renewable energy sources appropriate for that area. and building a prototype of a device that can be used to clean the water pollution. Extension: writing a letter to the stakeholders in the local community to fund cleanup efforts and ways to reduce carbon footprint. |
| Light up the Town with Series and Parallel Circuits
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Students will be able to choose one of three different projects, on different scales. The premise of each problem is the same. Students need to find the most effective circuit for their problem.
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| Recycling by Chemical Separation
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There are several environmental issues facing our community and our world. How can we use different separation methods like chromatography, distillation, centrifuging, etc… to separate contaminants from critical resources like water, air, or soil? How can we separate and isolate plastics or heavy metals and recover them from chemical compounds to protect our environment? |
