Throughout June 2020, MERGE Co-Investigator Dr. Matthew J. Traum collaborated with the Educational Talent Search staff at Santa Fe College (SFC) to create and deliver STEMTank, an engineering design summer program for high school students from rural and disadvantaged areas in North-Central Florida. The three-week-long STEMTank program included a staff of eight UF MAE seniors and recent graduates who served as mentors and prototype facilitators to STEMTank’s high school participants. STEMTank, which borrows elements from the popular Shark Tank television series challenges high school participants to:

1) identify a problem in their community,
2) develop an idea for a prototype to solve the problem,
3) design the prototype using CAD software, and
4) 3D print the product prototype for testing .

STEMTank culminated in a final reveal where all 11 participants went “Into The Tank” to present their prototypes for a pane of “Sharks”: UF faculty, SFC administrators and staff, and representatives from industry. The staff of STEMTank tackled an interesting challenge of running the hands-on summer program completely online via daily virtual Zoom meetings in light of the Covid-19 pandemic preventing in-person interactions. A paper describing how instructional technologies were successfully adapted to run STEMTank via the Web was submitted by Dr. Traum and his SFC collaborator, Adrienne Provost, to the ASEE Advances in Engineering Education journal.

This product example designed by a STEMTank student participant solves the problem of glasses slipping off a wearer’s face by using an over-ear clip that slides onto frames. The design is shown in four stages: A) a digital file in a 3D printer slicer, B) freshly printed [note the scaffolding] on a 3D print bed, C) released from the print bed with scaffolding removed, and D) in use on a wearer’s glasses frame.