Neil K. Dhingra – Outreach

As someone whose career is a direct result of early exposure to science, I think it is important that such experiences are accessible to everyone. I have worked with the MnDRIVE Graduate Scholars Program and Teaching SMART to teach short STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) lessons to elementary and middle school students.

Some materials for lessons I have led are included below.

Probability

This lesson is targeted to children between 5th and 8th grades. It introduces the concept of probability and applies it to the game of Monopoly. The students gain familiarity with the concept via experiments rolling pairs of dice.

Resources

• Probability presentation Powerpoint of the lesson.

• Probability worksheet Worksheet for dice rolling activity.

• Experiment spreadsheet Excel spreadsheet that plots dice rolling probabilities and simulated empirical distributions. It includes space to enter, aggregate, and plot the kids’ experiments.

Circuits

This lesson is targeted to children in 6th grade and above. It introduces basic ideas about circuits and robotics and leads the students through an activity in which they solder together a simple, functioning robot.

Resources

• WeevilEye The beginner soldering kit used in this lesson.

• Circuits presentation This powerpoint explains basic circuit concepts and how the WeevilEye robot works.