Perkins Elementary – STEM Field Trip (03.24.2023)

Last Friday on March 24, the Center for STEM Education had a chance to invite Perkins Elementary to Northeastern for the Paper Birds Competition. Thanks to Professor Alireza Ramezani and the members of his Silicon Synapse Lab, Juliane Hyvert, Kaushik Venkatesh Krishnamurthy and Adarsh Kaushik, we were able to welcome the 5th and 6th grade students from Perkins and teach them all about bio-engineering!

At this event, the students first learned all about engineering and how they are all engineers themselves! We then dived deep to learn all about robots and how we mimic animals to make robots even better! Juliane and Kaushik spoke more about ongoing projects at the Silicon Synapse Lab, including a robot that mimics exactly how a bat flies!

Silicon Synapse Lab’s robotic bat that mimics how they fly!

We then headed into the competitions, where each team had to construct their own paper airplane design to flight the furthest distance. Each team had 3 tries to throw their paper airplane. The first test was to allow students to view their planes in action and how they can improve the base of the airplane. The second test was to see how they can improve their design by adding a motor onto the plane. The motors would be charged up right before flight and helped propel the airplane forward. Every team had amazing paper airplanes, and worked hard iterating through multiple prototypes. The final test was to test their paper airplanes outdoors and see how well it tested against the wind!

Perkins Elementary students listen in as they learn about how airplanes work.

Say Cheese! Perkins Elementary poses at Northeastern after a successful day of engineering!

This was an amazing opportunity to work with Perkins Elementary again and we loved seeing everyone’s design. We hope everyone at Perkins Elementary had a blast making paper airplanes and hope to see them again!

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