• September 24, 2020

    High schoolers get hands-on and virtual transportation engineering experience at OSU’s Summer Transportation Institute

    Figure 1: Students survey the surrounding environment.

    A handful of Oregon state high school students were given the opportunity to gain a better understanding of transportation engineering through OSU’s Summer Transportation Institute, a program that the university, partnered with FHWA, put together and held late last August. 

    The staff designed and delivered transportation-related program content on a variety of transportation themes, including human factors, public engagement, system resilience, ethics, and real-world design projects. Staff also engaged a variety of speakers to deliver content on these themes. 

    The program’s staff consisted of David Hurwitz, who acted as the director of the program, and four research assistants – Amy Wyman, Ananna Ahmed, Jasmin Woodside, and Alden Sova – who served as the program’s instructors.

    Following the belief that the best way to expose students to the transportation domain is to go outside and experience it, the program contained two field trips: a campus walking tour and a bicycling tour of areas of transportation interest in Corvallis. 

    Figure 2: Students arrive back to campus from the bicycling tour.
    Figure 3: Local engineers, Josh Bjornstedt and Gregg Wilson, discuss the development of a new multi-use path.

    The walking and bicycling tours encouraged student awareness of transportation elements which can go unnoticed, and observation of applications of the concepts discussed in prior OSU institute modules.

    Staff also incorporated a variety of hands-on, technology-oriented activities into the morning sessions. For many tactile learners, hands-on experience is a very effective way to solidify information. 

    Students were excited to work with high quality, real-world equipment in transportation settings. Such activities included a Thursday morning spent working with drones and total station equipment, as well as a high-tech sandbox.

    An OSU geomatics research group, led by Dr. Chris Parrish, delivered a presentation on surveying and applications of geomatics, then performed an autonomous UAV scanning demonstration. 

    Figure 4: A student flies a drone.

    After the presentation, the students went outside and divided into two groups to complete two activities. One activity had students practice flying drones to observe a parking lot. The second group of students learned to work with total stations and other surveying equipment. 

    After laying surveying markers across a field, student pairs practiced tracking and recording marker locations using tripods and prism poles. Both activities allowed students to gain a real-world understanding of what surveying procedures look like in the transportation domain.

    An OSU construction engineering management research group, led by Dr. Joseph Louis, demonstrated a novel Sandbox as a research and operations tool in the construction and transportation engineering domain. 

    Figures 5 and 6: Students manipulate the sandbox and observe the effects on the projection.

    Students interacted with the sandbox to develop cut and fill decisions for a virtually projected road segment. The Sandbox was also used to overlay a traffic simulation on a geostatic road network. This activity introduced students to a novel hands-on research tool.  

    Adhering to guidelines laid out by the governor of Oregon’s office in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, there were 10 students in total who participated in the program – nine who attended the in-person portion of the camp, and one who was able to join in on the virtual portion. 

    PacTrans was able to contribute funding that supported some of the program’s instructional staff and a portion of the classroom materials.