A couple weeks ago I posted about a project at my friends Tyler Sarah, Phoebe  and ‘Shannon and I are working on called  BETAlabs. It’s a pilot program we’re doing with some students at Spaulding High School in Barre with the help of their school to work instructor our friend Michelle (aka LaFran) . Today was the big pay off. The two teams who have done the project  came to beta to present the results. The project was something that Tyler and Shannon and I came up with involving a test set up for electric motors. It was a pretty interesting experiment that involved winding electromagnets , building a rotary jig with permanent magnets and creating a scale measurement system to measure torque. The two teams of students each approach the problem in different ways. They designed the test set ups and use laser cutters and 3-D printers both here and at the generator makerspace to build their prototypes. Both of them required quite a bit of iteration. Then they won their coils on  were 3-D printed forms they had created and began their testing. I got to work with one of the teams to help them understand the basic math behind electromagnets. It was really fun seeing how quickly they caught onto the concepts. Today they came all dressed up to have lunch with us and then in front of a large group of beta employees displayed their projects and talked about what they learned. It was so amazing to hear them talk about what they learned about BETA Technologies and beta culture. It’s one thing to think about your own company… I was so proud of the teams and to hear what they had learned

we all got so much out of this exercise… We know how to improve it now so that we can take it to other schools. Our huge thanks to the students and instructors at Spaulding… And my deep congratulations to Sarah, Tyler and Shannon for creating this program !

nite all, nite sam
-me