The Center is now accepting applications for the summer 2015 cohort of high school students completing their junior and sophomore years to participate in ARISE, which provides STEM lab research experience and mentoring in NYU engineering and science labs. We encourage you to browse the participating lab descriptions and get an application in early! The New York University School of Engineering is partnering again with NYC FIRST to run its FIRST Lego League (FLL) and First Tech Challenge (FTC) robotics competitions throughout the five boroughs and the 2014-2015 season calendar is already packed. Here are updates and details on ARISE and FIRST programming.
FIRST season 2014-2015
Through participation in NYC FIRST programs, students learn the underlying engineering, physics, math and computer science that are needed to create robotic devices while also gaining teamwork and leadership skills. NYC FIRST and the School of Engineering provide schools and teachers opportunities to access these programs and train coaches. Thousands of students, their mentors, and teachers have registered for the competitions this year. FLL teams (4th – 8th graders) design a solution to a current scientific question or problem and build and program LEGO robots that perform a series of missions. In the 2014 FLL challenge, World Class, teams choose a topic or issue that people often need to learn about, research how people learn best, and then propose an idea or prototype that would help teach that topic effectively.
FTC teams (9th-12th graders) compete in a sports-like tournament model, designing and building a robot that can complete a series of tasks that are announced as the Challenge for the competition season. For this year’s challenge, Cascade Effect, teams must design, build, and program a robot to transport plastic balls into different “goals” to earn points. This year, in addition to providing clinics to teach team members robotics designing and programming skills, and helping to run the qualifiers, meets, and championships, NYU SoE is offering interactive robotics training sessions via Google Hangouts. 
Participants can receive advice and answers to their robotics-related questions live, from SoE graduate students. These online training sessions are not limited to NYC FLL and FTC participants, so we welcome you to sign up or log on no matter where you live. Keep up with the Google Hangout calendar which will be updated, periodically.
Applied Research Innovations in Science and Engineering (ARISE) 2015
Fifteen NYU School of Engineering and College of Arts and Sciences labs will be offering mentored summer research opportunities in engineering, life sciences, and computer and data sciences to high school students completing their junior and sophomore years for the third summer of ARISE. Over the past two years 53 students have completed the program. We encourage you to read more about their accomplishments and reflections on their experiences and to apply for the program.
Four former ARISE students and their mentor just returned from the BIOMOD competition and took home a bronze award! For the past two summers, Professor Rastislav Levicky’s Bio-interfacial Engineering and Diagnostics Lab at the NYU School
of Engineering has hosted two ARISE high school students as researchers. This fall, ARISE 2014 students Paulina and Edward and ARISE 2013 students Kip and Tanzila (now freshman studying engineering at SUNY Stonybrook and NYU, respectively) along with their graduate student mentor, Ursula, formed a team to compete in BIOMOD, an annual biomolecular design competition held at Harvard. Their project focused on DNA/RNA hybrids called chimeras for use in developing a biomolecular computer. Funding from The Pinkerton Foundation, which supports ARISE, allowed the team to travel to Boston for the competition.
