The highlight of this week was the visit from Parallax. Ken Gracey, Parallax’s CEO, was on hand to demonstrate some projects that can be completed with the Boebot and some sensors. The roving Jukebox was a particular delight. We deeply respect Ken’s commitment to improving educational outcomes and possibilities through the student-friendly, yet technologically complex products from Parallax.

In addition, our team made progress further exploring AppInventor and Littlebits. We are using this period to seek out every opportunity for STEM learning for our students and ourselves. We also explored some of the consumer Augmented Reality applications on the market to get a better understanding of complexity of the AR projects in the Mechatronics Lab. Jared, our talented and dedicated Ph.D. candidate in charge, has designed an Augmented Reality App (pictured) to use with a classic Control Lab experiment. We are hoping to put our pedagogical experience to use and design assessments for use along with the App in the laboratory experience.