pacific nw transportation consortium region 10 Pactrans

On April 21 and 22 of this year, the University of Washington, College of Engineering hosted its annual Discovery Days. This two day event features students and faculty from all UW engineering departments sharing their work with thousands of students, teachers, families and the community. Friday hosts elementary- and middle-school aged kids with their chaperones, and Saturday is reserved for high school students and their families.

Each year, PacTrans engages this fantastic outreach event in several ways. Firstly, PacTrans hosts a booth under one of the outdoor tents where we do our best to get kids interested in engineering. This year, we introduced kids to critical thinking and problem solving through the game Rush Hour©. Hundreds of kids took turns trying to get the red car out of the traffic jam, and in doing so, increased its mobility!

PacTrans’ director, Dr. Yinhai Wang, also directs the Smart Transportation Application and Research (STAR) Lab in the civil engineering department at UW. During Discovery Days, several of his lab students hosted in lab demos. Pictured below are PhD students John Ash and Ruimin Ke, demoing signal controllers and UAVs to middle school students!

PacTrans’ PI Don MacKenzie who also has a lab on campus, The Sustainable Transportation Lab, hosted a booth. Several of his graduate students produced interactive demos that strived to show kids the challenges with electric vehicle charging stations and bus only lanes. PacTrans has an ongoing commitment to outreach to expose young people to STEM industries in general and more specifically to transportation engineering.