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BillJumperContact Info:
Some personal background and vision for the course:I'm a physics teacher at Lowell High and I'll be teaching the Bat Design course along with Michael Doherty from Andover High. I've been teaching at the high school level for a little over four years, as the most of my adult life has been spent working in industry. I graduated from Lowell Tech (now UML) with a BSc in Physics and went on to receive a PhD from Dartmouth in Theoretical Solid State Physics before pursuing a career in industry. My industrial experience is largely related to the application of electro-optics and imaging systems, working as a team scientist on rather large systems engineering projects. I worked on dozens of projects in a wide variety of imaging modalities including multi-spectral visible, IR, microwave and X-Ray systems. Initially I developed application specific digital image processing and pattern recognition algorithms. However in time I managed such projects, and eventually rose to the position of a corporate Vice President at an Eastman Kodak Division and oversaw many projects at the same time. I've had the opportunity to work on or manage many large imaging satellite projects, in some cases modeling entire systems and generating 3d ground models, as well as finger print scanners for the FBI, facial recognition, and a wide variety of nondestructive testing projects such as an X-Ray Crawler to scan the Alaskan Pipeline for corrosive damage. Virtually all of these projects involved analyzing the requirements, modeling solutions, designing, prototyping and often building a half dozen to few hundred of some kind of electro-optical scanning system, as well as developing the algorithms and software to perform the analysis, and quiet often these systems being required to work in real-time. The reason why I am excited about teaching the Bat Design course is that I see the opportunity to teach you about the real world engineering design process, and have you gain some firsthand experience with all the elements. Hopefully you'll get a glimpse of how things are really done in the real world, but on a small enough scale so that you can participate in all the elements, and be responsible for the whole process. Anyway, I've been there done that, many times, so I hope I can transfer some of what I've learned and some of the excitement I have, to you, for the pursuit and the process of bringing science and engineering together, to solve real world problems. We will of course in the Bat Design course have Baseball Bat Design as our focus, this will allow us to take advantage of two great resources, 1) you, and your knowledge of baseball, in other words, by choosing a problem that is baseball orientated we’ll be engaging you on familiar ground and should be able to take you to the next level in background knowledge more easily. And 2), we’ll have access to the UML Bat Research Center, one of the leading (if not the leading) baseball research centers in the country when it comes to baseball bat testing and certification. With all the BRC know-how and facilities at our disposal you’ll be able to design, build and test you baseball bat in a first class real-world facility, and hopefully all of this will strengthen the meaningfulness and impact of your learning experience and understanding of the engineering process. I hope you'll enjoy the course that the TEAMS Academy has asked Michael Doherty and I to create for you. Don't hesitate to ask questions, add comments, and make suggestions, we'll all be learning togehter. |