Summer RET 2013

RET is a summer research program for teachers with the electrical engineering department at the University of North Texas.  This program involves teachers from around the Dallas-Ft. Worth area and assigns them a team that includes graduate students and UNT faculty.  This project is supported by a grant  monies from NSF.

This is an excellent program that challenges teachers, provides hands-on research experience and collaboration.  This experience is then taken back to the classroom through the development of a lesson and student activity.  The activity is designed to engage students and  demonstrate the importance of the engineering field.  

The program provides teachers with faculty seminars and training that allow them to experiment and design on their own with feedback from UNT  graduates and faculty.

Dr. Wan provided training on microcontrolers

Dr. Wan received a very prestigious grant from  IEEE.  The following information was taken from an article posted by the University of North Texas, Denton, Texas  Her lecture described the need for controlling systems, how it works and how it affects our daily lives. The following article was taken from the UNT website.

IEEE Control Systems Society Funding to Support K-12 Teacher Outreach Program

April 2013
Denton, Texas
by: UNT College of Engineering

The IEEE Control Systems Society (CSS) has awarded funding that will allow a control engineering track to be added to a program at the University of North Texas (UNT) aimed at helping area teachers bring research into their classrooms.

This funded IEEE CSS outreach project is a collaborative effort between the departments of Electrical Engineering (EE, College of Engineering)  and Biological Sciences (Biology, College of Arts and Sciences), with Yan Wan (EE) as principal investigator (PI), and Miguel Acevedo (EE), Shengli Fu (EE), Ruthanne Thompson (Biology) and David Hoeinghaus (Biology) as Co-PIs. The new award supports the outreach program to K-12 Teachers in control engineering in partnership with the National Science Foundation funded Research Experiences for Teachers in Sensor Networks (NSF RET) program. 

According to Wan, an increasing need exists for the development of high-performance decision-making algorithms to manage complex systems, including but not limited to environmental, biological, economic, and infrastructure-type systems. “Over the years, increasing number of algorithm developers, researchers in interdisciplinary areas, and practitioners in application-specific domains have realized the important role of control engineering, as providing invaluable concepts and tools to address various decision-making tasks in these broad applications,” she said.

Wan, who is the instructor of the undergraduate/graduate courses on control systems at UNT and a researcher in the same field, sees the need for instructing students while they are in the early stages of their education about the value and interdisciplinary asset of control engineering. To this end, an effective approach is to provide trainings to K-12 educators and help them integrate the basics of control into their teaching plans, she said.

The control engineering track will “guide the teachers to practice control concepts through many interactive activities, as well as multiple hands-on projects on the control of environmental systems,” Wan said.

IEEE CSS outreach program is an international award program that has supported outreach activities in many countries. For more information, please visit the IEEE CSS fund's webpage.

Dr. Wan will work with the Aquaponics Team to develop a control system that can could be used to  monitor water levels, pH, temperature and dissolved oxygen. The engineering of control systems affects our everyday 

Nick Tompson provides training on Arduino

The training students received was on working with the Arduino microcontoller.  This system was chosen because it is open source, there is a huge community available for support and it is relatively inexpensive.   The software and code are free  on the internet.  This allows for creativity of design.

Dr. Fu discussed WSN systems and how the work.

Dr. Fu, Sengli, will work this year with the River modeling team and help them expand on research done last summer to monitor water quality.   His talk discussed how a wireless system works and the benefits and restrictions of using this type of system.

Dr. Acevedo discussed the use of sensor at UNT's TEO side

The TEO (Texas Environmental Observatory) site  was set up by the Environmental Department of UNT.  Its goal was to collect environmental data using wireless sensor networks.  Sensors have been set up the "Greenbelt above Denton, Texas.  Weather data, soil moisture, temperature , ozone and water quality data  It provides an important source of local environmental data that is accessible to UNT faculty and students but also the general public.


These are just a few of the faculty involved with the RET program.  I will discuss other equally important faculty, graduate students and teachers in following posts.