Latest news with #DavidMartinelli
Yahoo
20 hours ago
- Science
- Yahoo
New STEM camp helps create engineering minded workforce
MORGANTOWN — Claire Drainer was already dominating at rockets as captain of her East Fairmont High rocketry team, so she tried balloons next. Drainer was one of 17 girls at a new week long summer camp called SpaceTrek, held at the West Virginia University Statler College of Engineering. 'It's amazing, it's a really good opportunity,' Drainer said. 'You get to meet a lot of really nice people and you get to do a lot of things you wouldn't normally get to do.' SpaceTrek originated at Kentucky's Morehead State University, primarily designed to bring more women into Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. It's made for young women entering grades 9-12 or their first year of college. Professor David Martinelli imported the program from Morehead to WVU, intending to adapt it for Appalachian needs. This is its first year here. The program itself teaches basic space systems engineering. The girls learn the fundamentals of electronics, wave motion and the electromagnetic spectrum, among other disciplines, as they put together a cricket satellite for launch aboard a balloon. The balloons climb as high as six kilometers into the atmosphere. After the launch, the team acts as a ground station, by pointing an antenna into the sky and picking up the radio signals the satellite puts out. The girls then use those signals to chart how the radio frequency the satellite is transmitting on changes as it ascends. State Sen. Mike Oliverio, R-Monongalia County, had to rally after graft funding for the program didn't come through in time. Typically, the program recruits during the fall semester for summer session. Oliverio, along with his wife Melissa, wrote to 54 West Virginia school superintendents and reached out to faculty, principals and STEM clubs. Word reached Drainer's grandmother, who told her granddaughter about it. On Thursday, Drainer's grandmother and her grandfather, Ed Buckner, were on hand to show support. 'I think this is a good opportunity for these kids to be introduced to STEM and be involved in STEM,' Buckner said. 'It's a good opportunity because girls would not be exposed to this kind of environment, with the training they get in the classroom. For instance, soldering and electricy, things like that. There's not an opportunity for them in everyday life to be exposed to that.' Melissa Oliverio knows first hand the value of programs aimed at young women. In her youth, she attended debate camp at Wake Forest, which sowed the seeds for her to enter law school later. Now as an adult, and despite the fact she wasn't a STEM student, she wanted to make a similar experience available to other young women in rural counties. 'I believe in the value of women learning with other women,' she said. 'This is just a tremendous opportunity, and we just had to try to help get the word out.' Martinelli said the majority of the girls came from McDowell and Mingo counties. Martinelli said those are some areas that have a disconnect with WVU and the school would love to increase the awareness of higher education there. Having the parents there on the first day of the camp was valuable, and after touring the engineering complex, the parents walked away understanding the value of sending their kids to college. Three of the girls came from East Fairmont High. Wes Deadrick, director of NASA's Katherine Johnson IV&V facility in the I-79 High Tech Park in Fairmont, was also present watching the balloon launches. 'You can spend a lot of time in the classroom and lab, but this is really where the rubber hits the road out here,' he said. Although the NASA facility does more work with software coding and ensuring no mission-ending errors are propagating before a mission launch, and not balloons or atmosphere science, he said programs like SpaceTrek create an important STEM pipeline that gets students excited with the hands-on applications. 'It gives us an engineering-minded workforce, having students that are homegrown that we can pull from the area,' Deadrick said. 'We'd love to hire West Virginians. They're dedicated, hard-working, have some grit and they tend to stay with us.' Solve the daily Crossword
Yahoo
6 days ago
- Science
- Yahoo
SpaceTrek engineering camp fires up at WVU
MORGANTOWN, (WBOY) — A new engineering camp at West Virginia University kicked off over the weekend, giving 24 high school students hands-on experience with the field of aerospace engineering. As described on the program's website, 'SpaceTrek is a residential summer program in space systems engineering for young women entering 9th—12th grade or entering college as a freshman.' Specifically, the program focuses on students in Appalachia and got its start at Morehead State University, but this year the program is making its debut at West Virginia University. David Martinelli, an engineering research professor at WVU and director of the SpaceTrek program there, said that exposing students to new challenges and environments is one of the main aspects of the program, particularly for students from smaller towns or those who are unfamiliar with engineering. However, Martinelli believes that just because a student might not have an established interest in engineering doesn't mean they are less capable of learning more. 'The technical fields are available for just about anyone, and universities are well equipped to meet students who have a reasonable aptitude in math and science, but meet them where they're at, and take them to the point of being able to perform in the workplaces in engineering,' Martinelli said. Alex Rhodes, a teaching assistant professor at WVU who is helping to run the SpaceTrek program, said he wants the students to learn that being an engineer is not as unachievable as it might seem. EXCLUSIVE: An up close look at the Green Bank Telescope 'I think the biggest learning outcome of this is to show students in high school that […] they're capable of doing these aerospace engineering jobs,' Rhodes said. 'These are within reach, something that they can handle.' During the camp, students will learn skills like soldering and wiring as well as other things like teamwork and planning. On Thursday, the students will put their skills to use and build a series of small weather sensors called 'CricketSats,' which will be launched via weather balloons and monitored remotely by students. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
13-07-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
WVU professor expands awareness STEM awareness with new space camp
MORGANTOWN — Next week, the skies over Morgantown will be filled with balloons carrying tiny satellites aloft in a brand new summer camp at West Virginia University. Beginning Saturday, 22 high schools from West Virginia and Kentucky will attend a weeklong program called SpaceTrek, and immerse themselves in aerospace engineering, satellite technology and Science, Technology, Engineering and Math education. The program will take place at WVU's Statler College of Engineering, and is designed for young women entering grades 9-12 or their freshman year of college. Three students from East Fairmont High will be in the program. The program also offers a preview of the college experience, with students staying in the dorms throughout. The program is an offshoot of Moorehead State University's program. While Moorehead's program is primarily designed to bring more women into STEM, David Martinelli, professor of civil engineering and director of the West Virginia Small Satellite Center, envisions expanding SpaceTrek to focus on the needs of Appalachians. 'I believe a boy in McDowell County is more disadvantaged than a girl in Morgantown,' Martinelli said. 'So, we do want to see this for boys. We think the key variable is not gender, but economic status and being captive to areas. They just have no awareness at all of all the things we have at the university.' Isabella Kudyba, 23, one of the program's student instructors, said this inaugural SpaceTrek was focused on young women because STEM is a heavily male-dominated field. While she's had a good overall experience as a woman in STEM, she once took a class where she was one of two women in a class of 40. Kudyba herself attended similar camps when she was younger, and her high school had a curriculum with engineering classes funded by a grant called Project Lead the Way. Kudyba is working on her masters in mechanical engineering. She said engineering day at the STEM camps at Penn State-Fayette was her favorite day and she enjoyed talking to the professor who led it. 'This camp is going to be a really good camp for them because the problems we're solving are really technical,' Kudyba said. 'I didn't learn how to solder in high school, I didn't know that much about circuit design, and I certainly never launched a weather balloon. The fact it's a week long camp they really get to dive into these problems and fully learn all of this stuff.' Students will spend a week on campus, taking foundational lessons in electronics, the electromagnetic wave spectrum, the atmosphere and other space connected disciplines before applying them toward the construction of a Cricket Satellite that can be launched by balloon. On Thursday, students will track their balloons and take radio frequency readings, noting how the frequency changes as the balloon climbs six kilometers into the atmosphere. 'The kid gloves are off a little bit,' Student Instructor Clarus Goldsmith said. 'It's not like, we've made this perfect little kit for you that will work beautifully and it's all Legos, and you do the blocks to code it. No, you're doing the circuit boards yourself. You're soldering all of it. We're going to explain each bit of how it works.' Goldsmith, 28, just finished doctoral work in robotics that looked at how insect legs worked, and then applied that knowledge to the design of robots that use legs for locomotion. Goldsmith said by the numbers at WVU, there are about 20 women in the Mechanical Engineering Department. They said it's important to start talking to young women in high school about STEM and going into STEM. Even then might be too late, since some women might have already made up their mind that they are bad at subjects like math. Martinelli said they're working on figuring out how to make SpaceTrek more modular, so it can be rolled out to other campuses and demographics. His goal is to make sure students all throughout Appalachia have an awareness that STEM can be a career path for them. West Virginia as a whole has a low college attendance rate, and Martinelli hopes to target the counties with a 20% college attendance or lower for the program. 'I'm a college professor and I'm the first to admit college is not for everyone,' he said. 'But I believe it should be higher than 20%. We think there are some college worthy K-12 students that don't get presented with the idea and pathway. We want to meet students where they are and get them across those first key barriers.'
