This past summer, Caroline Hortin, a first-year chemical engineering student, had the unique opportunity to attend the Early Launch Program.
The Early Launch program is a 7-week STEM program for highly motivated engineering students who want extra academic preparation and a chance to build a learning community within engineering before starting their first semester of college.
The Early Launch Program, in partnership with the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering (NACME), contains the 5-week National Virtual Bridge program, supported in part by MathWorks, followed by a 2-week on-campus residential event at the University of Kentucky.
The goal of the program is to support students’ academic and social transitions to college, including a curriculum taught by professors and graduate student teaching assistants from around the country spanning calculus, programming, physics and engineering design.
As part of the Engineering Design course, students were challenged to work in teams and develop a product that addresses one of the 14 National Academy of Engineering grand challenges of the 21st century. In the final week of the NACME National Virtual Bridge program, each team presented their design to a panel of judges from academia and industry.
Hortin and her winning Engineering Design Challenge team decided to tackle the challenge of carbon sequestration. They prototyped a plant window box named, “C- filtration box,” that leverages photosynthesis to capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere – turning every apartment window in an urban city into a micro-carbon filter.
Learn more about the challenge and Hortin’s project on the MathWorks Blog.
