Introduction
Members of the AmeriCal Youth Symphony and parents volunteers are very dedicated, and value the STEM field as a very significant part of their lives. To share their passions, they created a STEM program to share their skills with everyone through presentations, creating a fun opportunity to educate peers.
STEM Series 1 - 6/24/2023
Host: Kyle Zheng
Peter Ma: Minibot - Demo
David He: A general overview of Epidemiology: How are diseases studied, controlled, and prevented?
Written by: Clare Nguyen and Kate Liang
The first speaker is Peter, who is part of a robotics team that he is very passionate about. He presented a robot called a minibot. Minibots are a simpler version of robots, often used for new recruits to experiment with. These minibots would ensure that these recruits get hands-on experience with early robotics, who would eventually go on to tamper with the more complex robots at a more advanced stage. The minibot presented had many noticeable features, like wheels, a grid, a turntable, a container, and a turret. With these parts, the minibot could move, shoot Nerf balls, change the direction of the turret, and do many other fascinating things with some coding and wiring. It also has an intricate function to unjam the turret, along with joysticks and game controllers that mostly control the minibot's activity. As for the process of starting other innovative projects, the robotics team will brainstorm for a few days, share their ideas, and have a voting session. Upon decision, they will start the programming process and the work, along with some testing after that stage.
The second speaker, David, gave an engaging presentation about epidemiology, which is a field of science that focuses on the spread and control of various diseases. This presentation included a vast amount of information and topics on epidemiology. Some of these topics covered the different stages of the disease, with data collected and broken down to further understand the spreading process of illness, and disease identification. There are six stages of contagious disease, the agent, reservoir, portal of exit, mode of transmission, portal of entry, and susceptible host. The agent is the phenomenon that causes the disease, while the reservoir is a place that disease generally occupies. The portal of exit is how the agent leaves the reservoir, while the mode of transmission is how the agent spreads from place to place. The portal of entry is the place where the agent enters a host, whereas the susceptible host is the organism that the agent can enter. For this cycle to stop, someone has to prevent one of the stages from progressing into the next. For example, people with Covid can quarantine to avoid spreading it to others, stopping the cycle. It is crucial to identify the disease, so there can be more specific, and effective ways to stop its spread. Epidemiologists identify illnesses through symptoms and methods they enter and spread to people, by experimenting by using various tests, scans, etc., to understand how many people have been affected by that ailment. They may ask an infected person their whereabouts as well, as it gives us more details on the process of the exposure and infection. When there is a specific vicinity with several people who have contracted the same illness, people can investigate the cause by finding the exposures they share a similarity with. For example, if a group of people contracted salmonella, and they all went to a specific restaurant, researchers may identify the restaurant as the source of their salmonella, and come up with guidelines to minimize further spread. If a hospital contains an unusually high number of people with a disease, epidemiologists can ask the hospital to report any more cases of that illness.
Overall, many people were captivated by David and Peter’s well delivered presentations, at the same time gained a lot of insights on parts of the scientific aspect of STEM. Peter and David’s presentations were not only well organized, but also concisely delivered, as they broke down their presentations through small topics in order for the audience to thoroughly understand. Throughout their speeches, they shared their passions, as well as created opportunities for others to learn, which is something AmeriCal Symphony strives to achieve in the future.