Contact: George Manlove, (207) 581-3756

Wilhelm Friess, who will join the UMaine faculty in April 2012, has been teaching mechanical engineering for the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) at its campus in Dubai since 2009.

Friess will direct the innovative Brunswick Engineering Program, located at the newly renovated Brunswick Landing in Brunswick, Maine. The program is now accepting students for fall 2012.

“Dr. Friess has a distinguished record as an innovative teacher and international engineering experience, including being part of the seven-person team that designed the 2007 America’s Cup sailboat from South Africa,” says Dana Humphrey, dean of UMaine’s College of Engineering. “He’ll create a hands-on curriculum that integrates math, science and engineering, allowing students to discover the challenges and joys of being an engineer. We are very excited that Dr. Friess will be joining the UMaine Engineering Team.”

At RIT, Friess taught courses in such topics as mechanical engineering design, renewable energy systems, wind turbine aerodynamics and sustainable energy management. As part of his research, he led the RIT Dubai Residential Energy Efficiency Center, where the focus included building envelop optimization and solar module dust deposition in the desert environment.

Friess also conducts research in engineering education, sailing telemetry, and yacht and sail design. He was a design engineer for Team Shosholoza, the 2007 South African America’s Cup Challenger.

A native of Germany, Friess received his master’s and Ph.D. in aeronautical engineering from RIT in Troy, N.Y., in 1994 and 1997, respectively.

Friess is the first director of Brunswick Engineering, a two-year, nonresidential program offered by UMaine’s College of Engineering that features small classes and an integrated, hands-on approach that leads to a four-year engineering degree. Taught by internationally recognized faculty, the curriculum offers a world-class, affordable engineering education in a convenient location for students in southern Maine.

After two years of course work in Brunswick, students complete their four-year degrees in civil, mechanical, electrical or computer engineering at the University of Maine, or transfer to the University of Southern Maine.

Contact: Jessica Bloch, 207-581-3777

Contact: Jessica Bloch, 207-581-3777

Contact: George Manlove, (207) 581-3756

Contact: Meg Haskell, (207) 581-3766

Contact: Jessica Bloch, 207-581-3777

Ed Lindsey '84, who teaches science at Old Town High School, helps students in his 9th-grade Earth Science lab explore and measure the transfer of energy. Old Town High School is one of six regional schools to participate in the Penobscot River Educational Partnership's Earth Science Collaborative, which taps into multi-disciplinary expertise at the University of Maine.

Here’s the question Lindsey’s Earth Science students are exploring: How will the energy of the sun differently warm these two planets?

“Planet Z will heat up slower but eventually will be hotter than the Earth at the equator,” posits student Jaime Lemery, “but Earth will be warmer at the poles.”

That’s the hypothesis she and her lab partner Rowan Shelly are setting out to test, based on their mental image of water molecules being “freer” than molecules of rock and therefore transferring heat more readily.

Lindsey’s 9th-graders are among hundreds of students benefitting from a partnership between UMaine and regional public schools. The Penobscot River Educational Partnership’s Earth Science Collaborative draws participation from six area communities — Old Town, Orono, Bucksport, Hermon, Hampden and Brewer — with input and support from several programs at the University of Maine, including the College of Education and Human Development, the College of Engineering and the Maine Center for Research in STEM Education, which promotes career paths in science, technology, engineering and mathematics and works with educators to bring research-supported  practices into their classroooms.

The Penobscot River Educational Partnership, Down East Educational Partnership and the  Searsport and Belfast Schools are all part of the Maine Physical Sciences Partnership (PSP), a $12.3 million dollar initiative funded by the National Science Foundation to bring together schools and University of Maine faculty to work together to improve physical sciences teaching and learning in grades 6-9.  Now in its second year, the PSP holds regional meetings each week in which teachers, faculty, and graduate students learn from inquiry-based activities and discuss using them in classrooms. Professor Susan McKay, the director of the RiSE Center and Principal Investigator of the PSP, emphasizes how valuable it is for teachers to be using common instructional resources and to have a community of other educators to support their work.

“Building this partnership is a very important and rewarding part of the PSP,” McKay says.

The Earth Sciences Collaborative strives to create and support an engaging 9th-grade curriculum that will respond to the variable developmental levels of high school freshmen and prepare them for the rigors of upper-level classes in biology, chemistry and physics. With help from PREP partners at UMaine, the participating schools have developed elements of a curriculum that gets youngsters grappling with big-picture science concepts within the framework of Earth Science.

“What we’ve tried to do is complicated but worthwhile,” says Lindsey, a 1984 UMaine graduate. “It is to develop deep understanding of a few concepts that have explaining power over many topics and disciplines — examples are the behaviors of systems, energy and energy transfer, the balance of forces and resulting motions — and to impart in citizens a sense of the connectedness of Earth’s systems.”

For Lindsey and his Old Town High School colleague Lisa Schultz, that means getting students talking about big scientific ideas rather than about a lot of specific facts. It means introducing them to the language and culture of the science lab, the scholarly practice of evidence-backed debate, and the value of being able to articulate and defend their ideas coherently.

“What we want them to be doing is engaging in inquiry,” he says, “not just filling up their heads up with facts.”

For the planet-warming inquiry, the students in Lindsey and Schultz’s labs are using some specialized equipment developed at UMaine. Each pair of lab partners is assigned two narrow, tabletop troughs made of clear plastic. Designed to the teachers’ specifications, the troughs were assembled at the Advanced Manufacturing Center on campus.

The students fill one trough – “Earth” – with room-temperature water. The other gets filled with dry, pebbly material that looks like fish-tank gravel – that’s the mysterious, waterless Planet Z.  A lamp with a bright incandescent bulb shines on the center of the two troughs, hot as the sun.

The students outfit each of their planet models with electronic temperature sensors, one in the center of the trough and the other at one of the ends, representing the equatorial and polar regions of the planet respectively. Data-carrying cables
from the four sensors are joined into a single strand, wired to a thumb-sized circuit board and plugged directly into the USB port of the students’ school-issued laptop computers.

Developed and manufactured last semester by UMaine engineering students, the “UMeter” sensor is designed to be low-cost and user-friendly. It feeds a continuous stream of temperature data into the spreadsheet program installed in the no-frills laptops, bypassing the need for any additional software or programming.

Bruce Segee, UMaine’s Henry R. and Grace V. Butler Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, says the UMeter incorporates the same kind of technology being used in college-level engineering, but with a “friendlier front end.” Segee — who also is the technical director of the university’s supercomputer as well as the principal investigator on a $1.2 million National Science Foundation Information Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers grant — says the device represents a small tip of the iceberg when it comes to the potential for collaboration between UMaine and K-12 education in the state.

“We would really like to have kids and classrooms interacting and sharing data all across the state,” he says. For example, although Lindsey’s students are not currently working with peers in other schools as part of the planet-warming project, the technology is available to gather data from multiple classrooms throughout the state, crunch their numbers simultaneously and create a giant, multi-screen graph of the temperature readings on Planet Earth and Planet Z.

“Students in Old Town, Fort Kent and Kittery could all be working together in meaningful ways,” Segee says.

“It’s no longer just a matter of telling kids, ‘Here, memorize this stuff.’ It’s giving them the tools and involving them in the research process,” he says. “Kids have lots of questions about the world, and in most cases, the answer should be ‘Let’s
find out.’ ” By working in partnership with Maine schools, Segee says, UMaine can help prepare elementary and high school students for advanced inquiry in the fields of science and technology.

In addition to the six-school 9th-grade science collaborative, the PREP partnership with UMaine supports dozens of K-12 schools in Penobscot County in meeting state and federal curriculum standards, improving student performance measures, managing grants and promoting professional development among administrators, faculty and staff.

Contact: Meg Haskell, 207-581-3766

Contact: Jessica Bloch, 207-581-3777

Contact: Jessica Bloch, 207-581-3777

Contact: Jessica Bloch, 207-581-3777