A Quote on Computers and Humans

A quote by Robert B. O’Connor in the Journal of Occupational Medicine, April 1968:

Computers are extremely fast, accurate and stupid. Human beings are notoriously slow, sloppy and highly intelligent. When the intelligence of humans is coupled with the speed and accuracy of computers, data processing that far outreaches anything in the past becomes possible.

ps: maybe this is a good quote for me to use every time I assign students in my classes projects involving computer programming.

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Postgraduate research project

For the initial phase of the FlyOutreach project, I am offering to fund a postgraduate student for a Master degree by research here at the School of Aerospace Engineering, USM. The main background of the two aspects of the FlyOutreach project can be read further here: Outreach & UAV.

The scope of this Master degree project will be focused mostly on designing and building a UAV.

I am also looking to hire 2 undergraduate research assistants (one more vacancy left!) to support the project. Contact me here if you are interested to discuss more about these positions.

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Flying Vehicles

(There are two parts to this FlyOutreach project. The outreach part is described in this post.)

The aerospace engineering aspect of this project is on designing, building, and integrating the tools (i.e. the flying vehicles) we use in the demonstration and practical sessions. We plan to build remote-controlled model planes and eventually autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), uniquely designed for demonstration purposes. We plan to integrate live-streaming video (e.g. FPV), GPS navigation, and other capabilities to make things more exciting.

Detailed analysis on the flight performance of these UAVs will need to be done, not only for the formality of the design process and to simulate the flight behavior, but also to show to the secondary school students that we can use math to predict how these planes will fly even before they take-off. That'll be eye-opening and motivating to the students, I guess, when they see that the maths they are learning at school actually have some real applications.

Another engineering aspect of the project is on designing what tools to be used for the students in their hands-on activities. Obviously, when it comes to aerospace, it will have to be about building something that flies. But what, and how complex? That's the interesting part, where we need to think carefully on this practical module so that the students get a real sense of excitement when building something creatively using the newly acquired knowledge they learn in this program. These hands-on activities should also bring into students a sense of exploration, self-discovery, trial-and-error, team-working, and competitiveness (probably within a competition between students to build the best products).

Update 5/2/2014: Students working on designing UAVs in this project will mostly use CEASIOM (Computerised Environment for Aircraft Synthesis and Integrated Optimisation Methods), a new multidisciplinary aircraft design software developed under a large European project through a collaboration of 17 partnerships.

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Outreach

(There are two parts to this FlyOutreach project. The flying vehicles part is described in this post.)

The main goal of the outreach part of this project is essentially to get more secondary school students interested in science. Here, I'm referring to science in general, which includes fields related to math, engineering, and technology. The tasks at hand to do this genuinely are quite challenging. There's a multitude of perspectives that we need to consider:

1. Developing the program content: How should the program be designed and what content should be included to maximize outcomes? Some general aspects that might be included could be on delivering knowledge to the students to introduce key scientific principles that matter to the program, demonstrating the practical aspects of the scientific knowledge to establish their usage and importance in the real world, and perhaps building interactive sessions with the students so they become directly "engaged" in science. Of these three, which aspect will give the most impact? How do we integrate these three aspects into a whole package of an outreach program?
2. Identifying and measuring outcomes that matter: One of the relevant outcomes should be in terms of the increase in the number of students getting more interested in science after going through the program. How do measure more subtle aspects of the outcomes, e.g. students' behavior towards science? Will it be a one-off outcome where students' interest diminish afterward? What can we do to make any positive outcomes more permanent, where students' interest in science can be sustained over a long period of time?
3. Using relevant aerospace technology: What tools from the aerospace side that we should use to get the students genuinely excited about aerospace in particular and about science in general. Can we just get (read: buy) these tools anywhere? I think the impact is greater if we design and build them ourselves. How far into the design and building process do we have to go into and that we can share with the students at the secondary school level? I believe if we start from scratch this project can be more influential in terms of affecting students' motivation and aspirations positively rather than if we simply buy things off-the-shelf to demonstrate these things to the students.
4. The scale of running the program: The problem is a national problem, which means the scale of a program that can make a real impact should be large. But our attempt to do it will be limited based on our experience and resources. So what should be our strategy to maximize the value of information we get from the program? Some things to consider are the difference between students in rural/urban schools, students' varying exposure to science and technology, dominant factors in the program that produce real changes in students' attitude towards science, etc.
5. Language and culture: Most of the world's information are written in English, including educational resources on science for secondary/high school students. Is this - the language barrier - an influential factor affecting students' attitude towards science in Malaysia? Is our popular culture supportive to build a healthy attitude towards science, e.g. promoting inquisitiveness from young ages?

Taking all the above into consideration, our initial planning is to engage a few secondary schools, probably surrounding the nearby area but hopefully with varying demographics and performance to get data from a wide range of perspectives. With the current resources and funding that we have, each of the outreach program at these different schools will be a short one or two-day program. And within this limited time, we have to cram in a number of different modules, including a learning module to "uncover" relevant scientific principles but at the level that these students can appreciate, a demonstration module to show the practical use of these principles, a practical session module where the students get to apply these principles by themselves. An obvious challenge that we have is how to make these modules interesting. There's no point of doing all these if the modules don't excite students' imagination and interest towards science.

Reading the above, one may come to conclude that this project is heavily centered on the education side. The answer is yes (but more rightly fit into the engineering education category). We want to do this because we want to address a real and urgent problem, and it just happens that this "interesting" problem is more of a social/educational problem. But it's also a 'science' problem (as opposed to a scientific problem) - if less people are getting interested in science, how can that NOT BE a problem for science (in Malaysia)? It's a question of sustaining a pipeline of future scientists and engineers and technologists and mathematicians. So there's definitely a big potential here for somebody from these science fields to help contribute to tackle the problem. And that's where we come in...

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People

My name is Zulfaa Mohamed Kassim, the person behind the FlyOutreach effort. I'm a faculty at the School of Aerospace Engineering, Universiti Sains Malaysia. I studied aerospace engineering at the University of Minnesota, from bachelor, master, to doctoral degrees. Previously, I worked in the areas of particle-image velocimetry, multiphase flows, truck aerodynamics, and aircraft noise (the last two as a postdoctoral associate at the University of Manchester). Now back in Malaysia, I'm interested to work in areas that contribute directly to the urgent needs here. I find the issue of sustaining skilled human capital (i.e. the lack of students' interest in science) in Malaysia to be quite serious - and thus motivating! - but not really getting the full attention that it should. A part of my work now is focused on using aerospace science, engineering, and technology to get students enthusiastic about science for the enlightening part of it, for the practical side of it, and most certainly for the fun part of it. All in all, I believe aerospace engineering with all its flying things can offer the "cool" side of science. I can be contacted here.

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About

Background
In Malaysia, the issue of students lacking interest in science and math is becoming more critical. One report in 2012 showed that only 20% of students in the secondary schools are taking up the science stream, while the rest are in the art stream. This is far from our national target to have 60% students taking up the sciences. To make things worse, this number is actually in decline. Malaysia Education Blueprint 2013-2025 reports that we achieved a peak of about 37% students in the sciences back in 1998, which has gone down ever since.

The matter is even more critical when considering how far we are from achieving our national target of a fully developed country by 2020, set by the former Prime Minister Dr. Mahathir Mohamad back in 1991. As part of this Vision 2020, the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation (MOSTI) has targeted that Malaysia should have 1.2 million individuals with science-related training, a drastic increase from the current estimate of 120,000 workers with such training as of 2012. Plus, out of this 1.2 million, we should have 500,000 with degrees in science or engineering fields (again, a big jump from the 85,000 that we have today). All these are reported in the Malaysia Education Blueprint.

Given that less than half a million students nationwide each year sit for their SPM exams (at the end of their secondary schooling) with less than 100,000 in the sciences, it seems a gargantuan leap - even almost an impossibility - to achieve what we are targeting in 2020. Nonetheless, the challenge is there and needs to be taken up.

Purpose
We started this FlyOutreach effort to address the issue above. Our main goal in this research project is to increase the interest of secondary school students in science and math. We aim to do this by "bringing" to students the excitement of flying vehicles through learning about the physics of flight, flight demonstrations, and practical activities.

Approach
There are 2 parts to this project. The main part is outreach: reaching out to secondary school students to get them involved in our learning modules and practical activities. The main challenge in this part is to design these modules and activities to make learning and doing aerospace science fun for students, and to make them see clear connections between the sciences that they learn in the classroom to their practical uses in the real world. We also need to assess the impact of our outreach programs on students' attitude towards science.

The second part is flying vehicle: designing and building our own flying vehicles (mostly unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs) to be used in flight demonstrations in the outreach programs. The main challenge here is to develop our software and hardware capabilities to design and build UAVs that are unique and exciting for demonstrations, from scratch. We also need to integrate other capabilities onto our UAVs to make them more interesting: autonomous flight, live video streaming, etc.

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