by Magee Shalhoub, CEEO Program Administrator
This year, the Center for Engineering Education and Outreach (CEEO) was excited to celebrate our twentieth anniversary on October 23, 2016! The CEEO was established in 1996 and was one of the first pioneers to start thinking about engineering education. The CEEO works to bring engineering into K-12 classrooms to give students a fundamental understanding of what engineering is and support teachers in enacting engineering curriculum in their classrooms. It’s been an amazing twenty years, and the CEEO was thrilled to celebrate with CEEO faculty, staff, students, alumni, former directors, and employees as well as with the Tufts and local Somerville and Medford community.
We had two hundred guests attend this event! They were a mixture of Tufts staff, faculty, and deans, CEEO Advisory Board members, Engineering Advisory Board members, CEEO alumni, parents and children from the community, CEEO industry partners, CEEO teacher partners, and families and friends of the CEEO!
This was no ordinary celebration of course; in CEEO fashion, we had robots, research, competitions, and fun takeaways. Between three and five o’clock, guests picked up their laser-cut name tags and made their way through the different exhibits. There, we had hands-on activities that displayed our research and our outreach efforts. You could help solve an engineering problem from two different books from our Novel Engineering research, you could contribute to a LEGO robotics haunted house by building a spooky robot, draw something and have it laser cut on a CEEO keychain, make a musical instrument to bring home with you, and, borrowed from one of our STOMP activities, build a catapult to launch a LEGO minifigure across our office.
After guests spent time at the CEEO, they all headed down the street to Breed Hall for our reception from five to eight o’clock. At the reception, we had selfies with our big red robot, Baxter, a build-your-own LEGO maze, a community-based engineering challenge using cardboard and other tools, and a cookie-decorating robot (see video)! Guests went around to the different hands-on stations while enjoying refreshments.
At six o’clock, we had a welcome from the CEEO director, Merredith Portsmore, and then three special guests who each talked about the success of the CEEO over the last twenty years. First, Dean Jianmin Qu of Tufts School of Engineering (SOE) talked about the success of the CEEO and the contributions to the SOE over the past twenty years. Dean James Glaser of the Tufts School of Arts and Sciences (A&S) talked about how the interdisciplinary work the CEEO does with A&S and our impact on Tufts. Finally, we had Marketing Director Ken Yanhs from LEGO Education North America talk about the collaboration and long- standing relationship we have had together as we have pushed engineering into classrooms using LEGO robotics.
We finished up the night by showing a video that highlighted the CEEO and its success and by having all four of our CEEO directors over the past twenty years blowing out candles of our twentieth birthday cake!
We are so grateful for all of the people that came out to celebrate with us and that have contributed to the CEEO over the past twenty years. We look forward to our next celebration of forty years in 2036!
As we grow as a Center, we are always looking for partners and friends to collaborate with. If you have a joint grant proposal you would like to work on, contact magee.giarrosso@tufts.edu. If you would like to donate to CEEO, please visit our website on how to donate: http://ceeo.tufts.edu/donate
