Outreach ActivitiesProfessor Hasan has been and continues to be involved in several K-12 outreach activities. Lunchbox Seminar at Rock Prairie Elementary SchoolProfessor Hasan featured as a Lunchbox Seminar Speaker for the Enrichment Program at Rock Prairie Elementary School in October 2019. He spoke on the topic “Learning Science and Mathematics from Nature”. In this interactive presentation to 3rd-4th graders, he illustrated how everyone can learn optimization techniques (e.g., ant colony optimization, particle swarm optimization, genetic algorithm) from nature. Later, Professor Hasan and PhD student Spyros Tsolas played a “Human Algorithm” game, which is an interactive game to illustrate how algorithms work. In this game, volunteers from the audience act as if they are the steps of a bubble sort algorithm. Each volunteer carries out a specific task of assigning, comparing or swapping numbers, and a sequence of these tasks ultimately leads to the desired result.
Junior FIRST LEGO League ExpoThe members of the SOULS group also work with the Women in Engineering at Texas A&M University which organizes the Howdy Junior FIRST LEGO League (Jr. FLL) Expo. During the Expo, several teams of 1st–4th graders use their imaginations and explore real-world scientific concepts through research, teamwork, construction and imagination. We have designed a team-project based on the theme “Waste Wise” to teach team-members the importance of recycling and sustainability.
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