Rob Alexander, left, and Tony Chen examine the kind of ’gripper’ which will soon be delivered to the International Space Station. (Image credit: L.A. Cicero)
Three Stanford schools - Engineering, Medicine, and Humanities and Sciences - have opened the doors of their laboratories to teachers under a Stanford summer research program for middle school, high school and community college teachers. When his seventh and eighth grade students ask Rob Alexander what he did during his summer vacation, his stories will include references to geckos, flying robots, astronauts, the International Space Station and a robotics laboratory at Stanford. Alexander, who teaches industrial technology at Canyon Middle School in Castro Valley, California, joined the Cutkosky lab in early June under a Stanford program that provides eight-week research fellowships for science, engineering and technology teachers in the San Francisco Bay Area. In the lab, Alexander is working alongside researchers who have designed a custom robotic gripper for NASA's new flying robots - known as Astrobees - that are helping astronauts carry out routine tasks inside the International Space Station. His fellowship will coincide with a momentous day for the lab - July 21, the day the Kennedy Space Center is scheduled to launch the rocket that will deliver the gripper, which uses the lab's signature gecko-inspired adhesive , to the space station. Labs open doors to teachers. Alexander is one of 25 teachers participating in the Stanford Summer Research Program for Teachers, which is open to middle school, high school and community college teachers in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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