Saturday Symposium Showcases Engineering Students

This weekend brings the fourth annual 'IKE Scholars Symposium. Like yesterday's "Project Imua" rocket launch, the symposium is a unified grand finale of sorts for students from several different college campuses.

The Saturday morning symposium will feature the work and accomplishments of more than 90 engineering students, many wrapping up summer projects and internships. Students from Honolulu, Windward, and Leeward community colleges, as well as Maui College and the University of Hawaii at Manoa, will get to strut their scientific stuff to faculty, family, and friends.

There will be poster presentations (like a college-level science fair), with students talking about their work in fields ranging from renewable energy and water resources to robotics and rocketry. Last year, student Chris Strickland showed off a homemade electric guitar. This year, to prove the effectiveness of a solar-powered water desalination system, Kapiolani Community College's dean of engineering will bravely drink its output.

Other students will give oral research presentations, and there will be other demonstrations and lab tours. In the morning, the keynote speaker will be Kaipo Crowell, Nuclear Production Manager at Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard. And the program will end with a networking lunch, which will include award presentations.

The event is free and open to the public, although attendees are asked to RSVP online. It runs from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. at Holmes Hall on the University of Hawaii at Manoa campus.

'IKE stands for "Indigenous Knowledge in Education," and the six-campus program is designed to strengthen and widen the pre-engineering education pipeline from community colleges to Bachelors degree-granting institutions, especially for Native Hawaiians, women, and other groups underrepresented in engineering.

Participating students work their way through a sequence of Summer Engineering Experiences (or "SEEs"), building up to semester and summer undergraduate research projects. The program's motto is "Ma Ka Hana Ka 'IKE," or "In doing, one gains Indigenous Knowledge in Engineering."

'IKE is funded by a $5 million, five-year Pre-Engineering Education Collaborative (PEEC) grant from the National Science Foundation.

Last week, we interviewed second-year UH engineering student Jessica Blankenship Grazziotin on Bytemarks Cafe. Grazziotin, who is also an intern with HiCapacity and marketing director for the Hawaii chapter of Engineers for a Sustainable World, will be one of the students presenting at the symposium. You can listen to her talk about the event here:

https://archive.org/download/ike-scholars-symposium/ike-scholars-symposium.mp3

For more information on Saturday's event, visit the official website. To learn more about the IKE program, visit www.hawaii.edu/ike. or check out the information page on the Windward Community College site.

Photos courtesy 'IKE.