Projects

In Professor Elisabeth Arnold Weiss's WRIT 340 classes, students produce a group report for Accelerated Charter Elementary School (ACES) in South Los Angeles. Such reports are prepared with input from ACES teachers and students and focus on creating ways to improve academics, sustainability and after-school activities. Previous reports include proposals for an after-school robotics club and a pickup and drop-off system that increased traffic safety. A report on sustainability inspired the creation of an edible garden that doubles as a science lab.

Learn more about this group report here.

Led by Gisele Ragusa, this program will bring USC Viterbi undergraduate and master’s students into middle and high school classrooms, where they’ll work with local teachers to bring STEM subjects alive by applying them to solve real-world problems in engineering and computer science.

The program aims to eventually give around 4,000 middle and high school students each year the opportunity to gain exposure to STEM content and to experience it in an innovative way.

This program was made possible by a $500,000 gift from The Engineers Foundation (founded by Dr. Curtis Ling, co-founder of MaxLinear).

Learn more about the K-12 Teaching Program here.

Improv for Engineers (IFE) is an embedded classroom innovation at EiS. We offer modules every semester to all EiS courses, as well as a IFE Master Class every semester which is open to all Viterbi students.  IFE is a long standing co-curricular partnership between the USC Viterbi School of Engineering and USC School of Dramatic Arts, and it infuses improvisational theater training into the engineering curriculum by engaging students in spontaneous dialogue, role playing, storytelling, and scenario building, through dynamic social interactions. 

In addition to classroom modules and the IFE Master Class, a new offering, Improv for Engineers Master Class in Virtual Reality (IFE-VR), has been added to the IFE programming portfolio.  IFE-VR has been funded by a grant from the Engineering Information Foundation with Elisabeth Arnold Weiss as principal investigator. This new course is a leading educational application of VR, designed to leverage the immersive visual medium to create settings, theatrical style setups, and scenarios to enhance the learning outcomes and experience of IFE students. IFE-VR will feature a layered, multidimensional, and context-rich environment designed to accelerate the development of communication skills, stimulate creativity and imagination, and explore character, consciousness, and performance in a techno-human space. In 2022, IFE-VR will launch with a custom VR experience designed by Silicon Beach startup, Thinkin VR.

Information about the IFE Master Class for spring 2022 follows:

Led by Gisele Ragusa, the STEM Education Consortium facilitates comprehensive and strategic planning and application for federal STEM education grants. The role of the Consortium is to convene and support groups of faculty who are interested in applying for STEM education grants and provide resources, ideas, lessons learned, best practices, and templates for collaborative grant authorship in these areas. More information about the STEM Consortium can be found here.

Led by Gisele Ragusa, the STEM Education Research Group has several strategic research partnerships with urban schools, colleges, and universities within the Los Angeles, South Bay and San Gabriel Valley areas that connect STEM student learning interventions to teacher inservice professional development beginning in preschool and extending into K-12, community colleges and universities. These research efforts are critical to the advancement of STEM achievement in Pre-K- 12 and to increasing access to and persistence in college and into workforces of historically underrepresented groups. More information about the STEM Education Research Group can be found here.

Freshman Academy Renovation

Engineers Engaging Community

The Good Life Discussion Forum

Vision Venture

The premise of Vision Venture is simple: engineering students interview alumni who reflect on life transformative aspects of their education. These interviews are curated into a series of videos shared on the project’s website. 

Just as the concept of the vanishing point is often represented as a convergence of lines where a road, for instance, disappears into the horizon, students may confront a vanishing point when imagining their professional journey beyond education. While each student will have their own unique professional future, hearing stories of those who have traveled the same educational path can inspire and motivate students. Indeed, in the midst of their educational journey, students may not realize the life transformative nature of their education.  Hearing the perspective of alumni—those who have traveled beyond the vanishing point—can help students conceptualize their own engineering paths.

Student self-reflexivity is promoted through faculty led seminar-style workshops before students interview alumni.  Ultimately, the goal of the Vision Venture project is to broaden engineering education by facilitating students’ exploration of their engineering identities in terms of character, agency, and purpose; this co-curricular experience contextualizes professional competencies achieved through traditional coursework.  This project was supported by a grant from the Coalition for Life Transformative Education and funding from the Dean’s Office. Harly Ramsey developed and manages the project. For more information, email her at hramsey@usc.edu and click here for the Vision Venture site.

WRIT 340 students, enrolled in WRIT 340—Advanced Writing Communication for Engineers, have worked with the USC Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies (WIES) in Spring 2017, Fall 2019, Spring 2020, Fall 2021, and will work with them again this semester—Spring 2022. The general goal, for each semester, has been to identify and develop research that could positively impact day-to-day operations and services at Wrigley. 

The mission of WIES (https://dornsife.usc.edu/wrigley/) is to inspire global environmental solutions through frontier research and education. Their researchers conduct research in all aspects of the environment. WIES researchers investigate biological adaptations to climate change, study interactions among humans and natural systems, and connect science to environmental policy. Additionally, WIES hopes to advance environmental stewardship by spreading awareness and use of sustainable practices in society. To that end, they are making their Catalina campus increasingly sustainable, and use their island location as a testbed for emerging green solutions. This allows them to lead by example and teach others as they chart new ways forward. More can be read about this at https://dornsife.usc.edu/wrigley/sustainability-leading-by-example/.

In relation to WRIT 340, the students in Spring 2017 examined the food pipeline to and from Wrigley, looking at how food gets to the island, how it is used at Wrigley, and how food waste leaves the island. Some of the leading questions provided students included:

• How can we [Wrigley] lead by example and feed our guests sustainable meals? 
• How can we encourage guests to be more conscious consumers once they leave our campus? 
• What do we know about the food we’re eating? 
• What can we do to reduce our food waste?  
• Can we do this without making our staff people’s heads explode? 
• Can it be economical?
• Using the Wrigley Marine Science Center as a test bed, can we scale these ideas to the main campus?

In Fall 2019 and Spring 2020, the students examined water conditions, water use, and water saving strategies implemented at Wrigley, and on the entire island, to ascertain improvements, new technologies, and experimental methods. Some of the leading questions provided students included:

• How can we [Wrigley] lead by example and encourage our guests to be more water-conscious citizens once they leave our campus? 
• What solutions are passive? Which require electricity? Pros and cons of each?
• Which solutions are staff intensive?
• Using the Wrigley Marine Science Center as a test bed, can we scale these ideas to the main campus? To Los Angeles?

Each of these semesters, the students, working in small groups, conducted library-based research to identify methods, technologies, and strategies that could positively impact Wrigley, and in turn be scaled up to positively impact the urban, suburban, and rural environments of the Southern California geographic region. Based on each group’s research, they prepared a recommendation for Wrigley, which was first presented orally, as a group presentation, followed by submission of a group-written recommendation report.

In Fall 2021 and Spring 2022, the students will seek to provide recommendations regarding water retention and reclamation within and surrounding the WIES campus on Catalina Island, with a focus on:

• Rainwater runoff through their canyon, typically lost into the nearby cove, which is environmentally protected
• Collecting and recycling gray, and even black, water in their water system, ideally to potable standards

For more information, please refer to the USC Libraries Research Guide for this assignment here.