Meet Up & Coming Engineer - Sade Brown

Student Feature - Up & Coming Engineer

by Howard Bussey

Sade Brown

How many iterations do your projects go through? Whether they be design or implementation iterations, most projects have several iterations. Sade (pronounced shah-DAY) Brown, a student at Greece Athena High School, has already learned the value of iterative design and construction. Her eighth grade project was a robotic hand model, built with cardboard. Strings connected the fingers to the motors, and a small micro-controller board controlled the motors. This helped her understand the processes of gripping and releasing.

She changed the approach the next year, when she used Lego Mindstorms components to control a gripper, raise and lower the gripper, and rotate the gripper arm around an axis. She demonstrated how it could move objects – a small bag and a plastic spoon – from one spot to another programmatically. Her program had to control the three motors, and then position the arm and gripper for the next task. Last year, she investigated a different design that could perform those tasks in a different way – allowing the gripper to reach out so that objects could be grasped when they were nearer or further from the arm’s central axis. She hoped to be able to use 3-D printing to build the arm, but the COVID-19 pandemic postponed that goal.

Figure 1. Sade’s project has a cardboard hand with finger movements actuated by motors and strings and controlled by a microcontroller.

Sade entered all of these projects in the Terra Rochester Finger Lakes Science and Engineering Fairs. She likes participating in these fairs because it gives her a chance to show her talent. The yearly fairs help her set attainable and stretch goals. At ten years old, she stumbled upon drag and drop coding tutorials on the website code.com (now code.org). Later on in seventh grade, Sade was hand picked to be a part of the RIT Science Technology Entry Program (STEP). The program provides students with the opportunity to explore into the STEM field, along with figuring out their passion or niche. Since then, she grew to have a strong interest for coding in STEM. Besides coding, her other interest include choir (8yrs), playing the viola (8 yrs), cooking, and Figure 2. Sade’s second robotic arm project, built with Lego Mindstorms dancing. Ashley Simmons, director of components, could grip, lift, and move an object to a different place. STEP, said Sade takes pride in her work, never gives up, and has a neverending aspiration to learn. She is a role model for her peers in STEP.

Figure 2. Sade’s second robotic arm project, built with Lego Mindstorms components, could grip, lift, and move an object to a different place.

She uses visual drag-and-drop programming, and this allows her to implement the hand and arm control processes without getting bogged down in the details of particular programming languages. Her code wasn’t always perfect, and she learned about debugging by adjusting the motor activation parameters or adjusting the order in which the motors were activated. The pandemic has slowed her down; her school didn’t have in-person classes, and she had to learn a lot on her own. Prototyping materials in a lab at her school were available on request, but prototype construction is easier when one can see all the available materials. Sade hoped to be able to 3-D print components for her project, but this also was impossible because of the COVID-19 situation.

Sade likes that the science fairs give her an opportunity to show her talent, and they give her a framework for learning on her own, outside of school. She expects to enter the 2022 fair, and we encourage participation by Rochester-area engineers in that fair, which is going to be on-line on Saturday March 19, 2022.