2017 NATURE Sunday Academy

The NATURE program is a North Dakota EPSCoR sponsored education outreach project. NATURE aims to improve science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education among North Dakota tribal college and high school students and to build a pathway for the pursuit of careers in STEM disciplines. NATURE builds on activities of a long-term collaboration between North Dakota tribal colleges, North Dakota State University and the University of North Dakota. In 2017 NATURE Sunday Academy, with mentors - Profs. Jinhui Wang and Na Gong, American Indian high school students are brought together on a Sunday for the embedded system project and UAV demo.

2017 "Girls in Engineering" Expanding Your Horizons Outreach Workshops

IMPACT Lab organized two Expanding Your Horizons Workshops "Girls in Engineering", as a part of 38th Annual Expanding Your Horizons (EYH) Conference. EYH is a nationwide organization that holds regional conferences for young women in grades 7-9 to encourage and develop their career interests in STEM. During the two workshops, we worked with 36 girls from different rural high schools in North Dakota and introduced various research projects to them, such as wireless sensor network, embedded vision, intelligent video storage system, and UAV. Note that, the last photo (lower right) was taken by UAV.

2016 ND Governor’s School Summer Residential Program

Dr. Gong has served as an engineer mentor to ND Governor’s School Initiative program and this summer we host two high school girls in our lab. Governor's Schools is a six-week residential program for scholastically motivated North Dakota high school sophomores and juniors to offer concentrated instruction from NDSU faculty. The girls worked on embedded system development for UAV.

2016 Girls in Electrical and Computer Engineering Workshop

Multi-Level VLSI Lab organized the "Girls in Electrical and Computer Engineering" workshop for 7th-9th grade girls at the 37th Expanding Your Horizons Conference on April 9, 2016. 9 junior high school girls from different universities in ND and MN participated in the workshop. Girls were introduced to on-going research projects with several live demonstration of luminance-adaptive mobile video storage, embedded system (FPGA piano), unmanned aircraft system (UAS), and passive wireless sensor network. They were also introduced to research opportunities available to them in our lab.