March 16, 2020

Over the last several years, the familiar acronym, STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) has improved its reach by incorporating a seemingly disparate but actually complementary discipline: Art. That’s what the recent March 5th STEAM Night at the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Elementary School in Urbana was all about—exposing kids, especially minority students, to STEM via some element of art.

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November 28, 2018

On Thursday, November 15th, a number of community-minded Mechanical Science and Engineering (MechSE) Professors participated in Mattia Gazzola’s Paper2Tree project, some for the second year in a row. The goal of the project is to enable these faculty to give back to the community in a couple of ways. First, as the Paper2Tree name implies, the professors hoped to make amends for the number of trees used up when publishing by having crews from two partners, the Urbana and Champaign Park Districts, on hand to plant two trees. The event also allowed these educators to give back to the community by sharing what they’re passionate about— teaching and research. But instead of working with today’s college students, they were interacting with tomorrow’s—fourth and fifth graders at Martin Luther King Elementary School in Urbana and fourth graders at Booker T. Washington STEM Academy (BTW) in Champaign.

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December 1, 2017

While appreciating the beauty of nature on his 20-minute jaunt from his home in west Urbana to campus every day, Mechanical Science & Engineering (MechSE) Assistant Professor Mattia Gazzola decided that just gazing at trees and being refreshed in his soul wasn’t enough. He felt he needed to counteract one of the negative effects of his job—publishing papers that, over the life of his career would, in all probability, take the lives of a number of trees. So he came up with Paper2Tree, a practical way for those in academia to not just take, but to give back by planting real trees to replace the ones destroyed while practicing their profession.

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February 2, 2015

On Wednesday, January 28th, a group of 16 third and second graders from Urbana’s Martin Luther King School (MLK) took a field trip to the Orpheum Children’s Science Museum to experience the unveiling of the museum’s new air maze, plus do some other engineering-related activities, including learn about funny fluids and fluid mechanics.
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