New Haven Independent

Yale Engineering Gives Back to the Local Community

Sixth Graders Get Hands-On Experience Wiring Circuits
and a Heartfelt Introduction to Careers in Engineering

“When your parents or someone else tries to wake you up in the morning, do you want to get up?”
“No!”
“That’s right, you don’t want to get up. Why? Because you don’t have any energy!”

Energy became a persistent metaphor in his presentation when Christopher Yerino (Yale College ‘06) introduced twenty sixth-grade summer enrichment students to the concept of battery generated electricity. A research associate in Jung Han’s lab in the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Yerino was invited to introduce the first class of students at the University of New Haven Science and Engineering Magnet School’s summer enrichment program to careers in engineering and the sciences. Put on by the New Haven Board of Education, the program met daily for five weeks in the classrooms of Saint Louis’ Church in West Haven. The summer enrichment program works with the youth of West Haven, New Haven and the surrounding area in the subjects of math, reading and science in preparation for their enrollment into the newly formed Science and Engineering Magnet school. Each afternoon, students in the program spend one hour on science projects. Alice Sun, director and owner of a Kumon location in New Haven, decided that this hour would be a good opportunity to introduce the students to people currently pursuing careers in the sciences and engineering. As part of her community service to the New Haven Board of Education, Sun recruited local area scientists to the enrichment program. In addition to Yerino (pictured above) other Yale scientists such as Dr. Lei Xue, a geneticist at the Yale School of Medicine, donated their time to showing the youth some of the exciting possibilities enabled by their education. Dr. Xue brought in fruit flies to show students how Yale scientists are making breakthrough discoveries in cancer research. “The Kumon program is helping the Sciences and Engineering Magnet School this summer,” says Sun, “and we will continue to help them for an entire year with math and reading enrichment.”

Yerino, a strong proponent of hands-on learning, borrowed eleven circuit boards from the teaching lab of the Electrical Engineering department. He also brought with him a handful of light-emitting diodes, capacitors, motors, resistors and other equipment. Though most of his time is focused on gallium nitride nano-scale crystal growth, Yerino dedicated some time to soldering wires together and designing circuits that the students could assemble themselves. “It’s difficult to show the kids the work I do,” Yerino explained, “because the structures I work with every day are so small. I could make a PowerPoint full of SEM images, but what kids build themselves they really remember.”

During his time with the students, Yerino helped them wire a circuit that powered a small motor and a circuit that sent current to an LED. The sixth-graders were extremely engaged, asking questions anywhere from “Why is there acid in a battery?” to “How do LEDs work and where can I buy one?” At the conclusion of his time with the students, Yerino gave a lesson in logic as well as how logic circuits form the basic building blocks of modern computers. The concepts of and, or, and not and took on deeper meaning as Yerino connected his two input lights to different logic chips on a circuit board that he had prepared.

After such an informative session, Yerino got to the heart of the issue and why he was invited to speak. “I hope that you will consider careers in engineering or science,” Yerino reemphasized in a follow-up letter to the students, “developing skills both for designing and building as well as for solving problems important to our society. Whatever you choose to do, I strongly believe that each of you has great potential for career success. Thus I encourage you to take full advantage of the education ahead of you. As you learn more about how the world works, you will find more fascinating new things to discover and more doors will open for your future careers.” Indeed, the time and dedication of these and other volunteers will help local students to continue to pursue and enter these open doors in their future careers.