Educational Outreach
Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school. The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think - Sir Albert Einstein
Our mission is aligned with the mission of the USC. We have the following eduational outreach goals
- Provide systematic STEM education
- Foster environment for intergrated research, critical thinkng and scholarship
- Provide support to the immediate community, the state of South Carolina, the nation and the world
Promoting STEM among K-12 Students and HS Teachers
We value outreach activities by promoting STEM education in High Schools. We regularly appoint K-12 students in our laboratory by giving them opportunity to work on our exciting and innovative research projects via development of simple technology driven fun tools.
We not only value K-12 contribution to our resaerch, with our graduate students we also set few training goals, such that by exposing the K-12 students to science, technology, engineering and mathematics, we assure that K-12 students are motivated towards science/engineering and simulataneoulsy the graduate students are motivated towards further higher education and teaching. We specially focus on the minority students by giving them more opportunity to expose them to engineering. We highly recommend our K-12 students to participate in state wide and national wide science competirions by presenting their work that they conduct in our laboratory. Following students have worked/working in our laboartory.
Peer-Instruction Method for Teaching
We strongly believe that one can be best taught through discussion. Fostering the environment where critical thinking can be enhanced through the peer discussion is our primary objective.
To foster critical thinking among the students, we avoid providing the direct answers to a problem encountered, but instead asks a series of questions that trigger the student's thinking capabilities and point them to the right direction. Such direction can even be found from their fellow friends or class mates, thus it only strengthen the believe in peer instruction method.
