Budding engineers take flight at OSU-Tulsa summer camp

Madison Maier is precise with her measurements. She knows a few extra centimeters of foam board could be the difference between a soaring model drone and a pile of broken materials.

“I like measuring and trying different designs to make the best drone,” said Maier, a freshman at Glenpool High School. “It’s pretty cool that you can take regular foam boards and turn them into something that can fly.”

Though she’s only in her first year of high school, Maier is already considering a career in engineering. That interest brought her to Oklahoma State University-Tulsa on Friday to build a model unmanned aerial vehicle, or what’s more commonly known as a drone.

The project was part of the Tulsa Alliance for Engineering’s annual summer camp for middle and high school students. OSU-Tulsa partnered with Wallace Engineering for the event, which gives students like Maier the opportunity to learn more about the different fields of engineering.

The camp included instruction from Dr. James Kidd, OSU clinical associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, on aerospace mechanics and a lesson on how to build a model drone. Students applied the knowledge they gained from Kidd to build their drones.

Maier was placed with a team of eight other students to design, construct and test a model drone using foam board, glue and an electronic motor.

“Each member brought their own ideas about design and construction and they had to come together as a team to find the best solution,” said Ronald Knight, OSU-Tulsa academic coordinator for the College of Engineering, Architecture and Technology. “In addition to applying engineering concepts, the activity teaches them important lessons about problem solving and teamwork.”

The project challenged A.J. Pace, a freshman at Broken Arrow High School, because of the number of people on his team.

“I […]

CASE STUDY: Spectra and the Tandy Supercomputer shorten calculation rates from days to minutes, saving time and lives.

America’s First “Community” Supercomputer
TSC’s business model is unique because it creates a community of users, sharing the costs of infrastructure and support, making this resource available to parties who couldn’t otherwise afford it. Located in the Data Center at One Technology Center (Tulsa City Hall), TSC is committed to continuously provide their users with modern high performance technology by regularly updating the supercomputer with state of the art technology. This allows TSC to seamlessly add nodes as its membership base increases.

The Challenge: Affordable, Transparent File Storage
The Oklahoma Innovation Institute launched its community supercomputer project in 2013. TSC currently manages approximately 30 TB of data for its users, primarily scientific data sets for research projects. TSC has a large, high-performance Panasas object storage system and acts as a global storage pool for multi-user access. The IT team decided to house some data on-site at their Tulsa datacenter, and sought a reliable, scalable storage solution to archive information being accessed by multiple users at any given time.

TSC needed to provide an alternative from their primary Panasas NAS for medium-term archive and lower-speed workflows with many metadata operations. The envisioned solution would ease the load on the primary storage to increase the overall performance of demanding research and engineering workflows. TSC wanted to offer transparent file storage access that was invisible to the individual users accessing the data frequently.

Spectra Logic
June 10, 2014
Link to Case Study

The Tulsa Charity Flight Night will be on September 18, 2014. This year the Tulsa Regional STEM Alliance will be a beneficiary, along with the Fab Lab Tulsa.

The Siegfried family’s long-running “Fight Night” tradition is getting a major shakeup, one that may fit the clan’s aviation leanings better. In September, the annual “Fight Night” will become “Flight Night,” with an ‘L,’ and is moving from the ring to the air. Instead of prizefighting, the Sept. 18 fundraising and flight-themed event will feature an air show, entertainment and a live auction.

For 21 years Fight Night brought in the biggest names in the pugilism, such as Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier and Evander Holyfield. But the family wants to put more emphasis on education, and their NORDAM company’s emphasis on supporting so-called STEM areas — science, technology, engineering and math.

“This collaboration will be a game-changer in STEM education in the Tulsa region,” said Bailey J. Siegfried., vice president of global marketing at NORDAM in a statement. “The funds generated from Tulsa Charity Flight Night will inspire creativity, spark excitement and harness the inspiration, resources and experience of STEM stakeholder, ultimately broadening horizons for children across northeastern Oklahoma.”

With funds raised from the event, the family hopes to fund a one-day STEM event in Tulsa for students, a Quadcopter challenge where students compete against each other designing flying machines, as well as a mobile “fab lab” to engage students in emerging technologies.

“Trained specialists in STEM disciplines are critical to many, if not all, industries in our city, state and nation to properly compete globally and create technology to propel us into the future,” said NORDAM CEO Meredith Siegfried.

Along with NORDAM, the Muscogee Creek Nation and Asphalt Fuel Supply are title sponsors of the event. The Flight Night group is still working on getting clearance […]

The National Science Foundation awarded a grant in September of 2013 to the OneOklahoma Friction Free Network (OFFN) to deploy a high speed research network between the supercomputing centers in the state of Oklahoma.

The OneOklahoma Friction Free Network (OFFN) is a collaboration among four Oklahoma institutions that have significant High Performance Computing resources available for academic research: the University of Oklahoma, Oklahoma State University, the Tandy Supercomputing Center of the Oklahoma Innovation Institute, and Langston University, Oklahoma’s only Historically Black University, along with OneNet, Oklahoma’s education, research and government information and telecommunications network.

Triggered by research needs in high energy physics, numerical weather prediction, bioinformatics and weather radar, but available for researchers across all Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines statewide, OFFN serves as a crucial component of the OneOklahoma Cyberinfrastructure Initiative (OneOCII), which provides resources and services to researchers and educators across the state, and which has so far served almost 100 institutions and organizations, approximately half of them academic.

For more information on the grant, please visit the National Science Foundation Website.

Video by the Oklahoma Department of Commerce.

“Oklahoma has transformed the heartland into a global crossroads. Our businesses are booming and we’re a leader in everything from unconventional energy to unmanned aerial vehicles.”

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