This past spring, CSI’s Outreach team received the Robert D. Lilley Award for Socially Responsible Engineering at Columbia’s 2024 Leadership and Excellence Awards. This award is given by the Dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Columbia to the engineering group that best creates engineering projects in economically or socially disadvantaged areas, student research projects directed towards topics that relate to socially responsible engineering, and campus education efforts that focus on engineering ethics.

We were awarded for our work with our educational space science program that reached over 1,000 students in under-resourced middle schools in the past year. Some of our work includes model rocketry, a balloon-dropping activity, and a paper-airplane lesson. In our model rocket lessons, we teach students about aerodynamics and design considerations when making a rocket, then they build their own rockets with components manufactured by CSI volunteers. We then launch the rockets at their schools to help bring these aerodynamics lessons to life. The balloon-drop activity and paper airplane lessons are interactive activities that are a part of our “auditorium programs,” where we teach students about space and engineering principles such as aerodynamics, astronomy, and structural design.

At the end of the year, we host Spaceposium as our culminating event, where members of all CSI missions are able to present about their year-long projects to fellow peers, members of the Columbia community, and students from our partner middle schools. At our most recent Spaceposium in April 2024, Outreach members gave a coding lesson to students where they learned the very basics of programming. Then, they were able to put what they learned to use by writing code to guide a robotic car through a maze. Other activities included plasma lab tours and poster sessions where middle schoolers got the chance to learn about CSI’s missions. We are so honored to be recognized with this award and look forward to continuing our work in exposing STEM to middle schoolers across the city!

Read more about the award here: https://www.cc-seas.columbia.edu/awards/honorees/2024

– Outreach Team