The College of

Arts and Sciences

ing number of students entering programs and choosing careers in STEM, there is a need to mentor and encourage underrepresented students. In our lab, we are focusing on mentoring minority students, students with physical challenges and Autistic students. This has been twenty-year journey where I have had this special opportunity to help them stay on the path to STEM degrees and careers. Many have become successful engineers, managers, scientists and software programmers.

Here is the Link to the video of the students interacting with the Virtual Environments.

I had been working with VLEs for almost a decade and seen the impact it had on K-12 students towards encouraging them in STEM. With Dr. Mary Sweet-Darter, we designed VLEs that would provide a safe learning environment where some of the 3D stimuli and interactions could serve as positive reinforcers during learning interaction. We introduced learning of STEM concepts to Autistic students as part of our mentoring activities. Such early interactions with virtual learning environments introducing concepts from shape learning to robotics (and other STEM topics) are key to opening up new avenues to encourage and sustain the interests of Autism students especially towards college level educational programs and careers.

At Oklahoma State (2009- present) and New Mexico State (2001-2008), our lab has also focused on mentoring Hispanic, Native American, Women and African American students in mechanical, industrial, electrical engineering and computer science. Many of my mentees encountered difficulty in grasping concepts in various courses. I have developed VLEs to help them understand specific concepts in courses; eg. assembly planning, genetic algorithms. This was time consuming at first but once I designed and built it, I was able to modify this and use it for successive groups of mentees in later years. I was fortunate to receive funding from NSF and NASA to create such learning environments. They made a big difference in communicating and helping learn complex concepts in a more interactive and visual manner. The interfaces, content and learning interactions were modified based on the mentees backgrounds and challenges.

Encouragement of mentees towards graduate school is a gradual process. Introductory STEM demonstrations in various areas (eg: space habitats for NASA funded projects), exposure to small scale research activities along with encouraging mentees to attend nearby conferences had a major impact. Gradually, I helped my mentees get involved with Research Experiences for Undergraduate projects.

Some of our mentees have physical challenges and limitations. VR/AR based environments have opened up a world of new possibilities where they can not only interact with distant worlds but also gradually acquire skills to design and build such environments. This leads to employment opportunities as researchers and engineers.

 A REU student explores the design of a lunar surface VR model where he designed an automated way to assemble a habitat for astronauts to live in

Other elements of our mentoring program:

• Encouraging our mentees to present and publish their undergraduate and graduate research; we also support their participation at conferences and provide travel support to present their papers at national and international conferences
• We are working with autistic students in engineering to encourage them towards graduate school.
• We encourage our university mentees to mentor K-12 students in our Soaring Eagle programs who attend our on-campus workshops and STEM activities

Images from a Soaring Eagle workshop for high school (left) and middle school (right) students

An autistic student (second grade) is introduced to our solar system using a 3D VR simulation environment (she is wearing 3D eye-wear, Dr Cecil is on her right)

An elementary school autistic students is introduced to floatation (using a haptic interface) as part of an introduction to STEM activity

Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs)

The Solar system learning module was developed to teach the concepts about the planets in the Solar system. The module was developed for both non-immersive and fully immersive platforms. The students also learned about concepts such as rotation and revolution in this module.

The Lunar Surface Exploration module was created to teach the concepts about Space Exploration Vehicle (SEV) and its operation on the lunar surface. It is created using the fully immersive platform in which the students can stand on the lunar surface and watch how the SEV operates in 3D.

The Robotic module was created to teach the concepts of robotics related to the moon mission. A virtual assembly robot was developed based on the Robonaut2 model which was capable of assembling habitats on the lunar surface.

The Augmented Reality (AR) based training module was created to train astronauts inside the lunar gateway for activities such as repairing a laptop and storing the payload in the required location. This module was created as a part of X-Hab challenge 2020.

Work in Progress

We are creating new VLEs to introduce students to the Orion, SLS launch, flight path to reach Gateway and the moon.