How to Film Great Video with a Phone

In this video, NOVA producer Alex Clark shares 3 fundamentals of shooting with a smart phone, from optimizing your phone to store high quality videos to holding your camera and framing your shot.

View the Activity
Mastering Lighting and Audio in Your Videos

Want to elevate the lighting and audio in your videos? NOVA producer Alex Clark breaks down proper audio and lighting techniques to consider, whether you’re shooting with a professional camera or a smart phone!

View the Activity
The New Frontier of Swarming Robots

Inspired by nature, Carlo Pinciroli, assistant professor of computer science and robotics engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), leads a research team in the Novel Engineering for Swarm Technologies Laboratory that is trying to give swarms of fairly simple robots a sort of collective intelligence, so they can sense their environment, communicate, and work together efficiently and safely.

View the Activity
Drying It Out

In this presentation, we will introduce you with the world of drying. You will get a basic understanding of the concept of drying and the importance of drying. You will also learn about multiple innovative drying technologies that are developed in CARD. Our undergraduate researcher will also share his personal experience of working in the research lab and WPI.

View the Activity
Computer Simulation of a Concussion

This video will demonstrate some basic science behind how concussion occurs in the brain. A concussion is the damage to the brain caused by external head impact. In particular, the rotational part of the impact is the primary reason to cause the brain to change shape. This will lead to the so-called “brain deformation” that stretches brain tissue, in particular, the white matter region. This part of the brain connects different gray matter regions of the brain, and will, therefore, disrupt the information flow within the brain. When brain deformation is too great, injury will occur, which leads to concussive symptoms.  

View the Activity
Silkworms & Silk

This exhibit will show you the different stages of the silkworm life cycle and some of the materials and research areas being investigated by the Coburn lab. Silk is achieving new applications in biomedical engineering.  Silk fibroin, a protein produced by silk, is used in drug delivery, disease modeling and can be fabricated into films, fibers, particles, hydrogels and scaffolds.   

View the Activity
Development of a Teleoperated Lung Ultrasound Scanning Robot

COVID-19 has already taken on a pandemic of epic proportions. In April 2020, a team of researchers from the United States, Nigeria, and Japan was formed to develop a teleoperated ultrasound scanning robot to make Lung Ultrasound (LUS) accessible in a resource-limited environment for COVID-19 diagnosis with a minimized risk of transmission between patients and healthcare workers. The developed robotic LUS platform comprises a passive-scan end-effector which connects the ultrasound probe adaptively to the chest, and the gantry-style positioning unit, which enables a whole scan of the LUS area.

View the Activity
DuPont Electronics & Industrial​ – Chemistry Enables Electronics​

Believe it or not, you have some of the same technology in your phone as the Perseverance rover on Mars! The electronics devices you use every day like your cell phone include a lot of high-tech materials made by DuPont Electronics. This sounds very complicated, but some materials are actually based on a chemical process called Copper Electrodeposition, which you’ll learn from high school Chemistry Lab.

View the Activity
Introduction to Materials Science

Have you ever wondered what your favorite products are made of? Learn about the types of materials all around you and why they are used in everything from sneakers to cellphones to airplanes!

View the Activity
Take Apart a Robot: Roomba i7 Robot Vacuum

Follow along with Irene and Lewis from iRobot as they take apart an iRobot Roomba Robot Vacuum! See and learn what the components do and some of the cool jobs that go along with making a robot.

View the Activity