Engineering students see great benefits from virtual events in place of physical ones.
However, the COVID-19 pandemic has led to widespread restrictions on physical gatherings, as well as short and long-term shutdowns of businesses and public spaces around the country. Students have been particularly affected, with most classes moving online and physical events being curtailed—which meant that many engineering students were at risk of losing out on this important experience.
But engineers are nothing if not resourceful, and engineering department faculty and students stepped up to find new ways to recreate the experience of their poster presentations virtually. Of the various virtual platforms that popped up in 2020, one of these was ProjectBoard.World, a platform that is built for and customizable for major STEM events. ProjectBoard is uniquely focusing on the student’s STEM project presentation and addressing the core aspects of an in-person experience with abilities to explore, comment and engage directly with thousands of students on their projects of interest. ProjectBoard.World hosted Youth Science Canada’s virtual national STEM event through Make: Projects in 2020, and will be hosting other major STEM events in 2021 such as the American Junior Academy of Science (AJAS) poster session this February.
Gather.town is another one of these virtual platforms—and one that is making a name for itself as a fun and interactive way to host events online that recreates some of the feel of an in-person event.
Wish Life Was More Like a Video Game?
2020 felt very digital, thanks to the exponential rise of virtual events and interactions in the months since the world went into lockdown in March of last year. Engineering students finished their semesters online, and faced an uncertain summer and fall, but the rise in online courses and events has done a commendable job ensuring that students can continue to study, work with their peers, and enjoy socializing safely.
While nothing compares to real-life, Gather.town offers universities and students a unique way to engage in place of in-person interactions. Wrapped in an adorable retro-pixel videogame aesthetic, Gather combines user-created 2D top-down maps of your event space with live audio and video calling that activates with your avatar’s “Interaction Distance,” which is your avatar’s proximity to other objects and people on the screen—allowing users to mimic the spontaneous experience of wandering the floor at an event and being able to listen to or speak with other people standing nearby.
Along with customizable maps and avatars, the Gather interface offers objects including whiteboards, podiums, livestream and screensharing options, private spaces, poster images, and a variety of ways to interact with other people. You can even “raise your hand” to ask a question.
Sounds familiar? Because we sure think it sounds a lot like the experience of walking through a poster presentation session in a university public space.
Campus Events, Online and In Style
This is exactly what several universities did when they discovered Gather.
Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) runs an annual summer research program in the Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) department that provides undergraduate students with paid summer positions working as full-time researchers with CMU faculty. Organizers Susan Finger and Gerald Wang, both CEE professors, turned the program into a digital one in 2020 to ensure that students would be able to complete the program—especially important for these students as pandemic shutdowns cancelled many summer job and internship opportunities for engineering students.
More than 30 master’s and undergraduate students completed the summer research program, with the final event being a poster presentation session. While the students could simply have presented their posters and research over one of the regular videoconferencing platforms such as Zoom or Google Meet, instead Finger and Wang looked for something to make the experience as close to a typical in-person poster session as possible.
Their search led them to Gather, and soon they had a full experience literally mapped out for the poster sessions. Bird’s-eye maps of several parts of the Carnegie Mellon campus were created in Gather, with podium spots for each poster presenter. Attendees each have an avatar that they navigate through the map, and the avatar’s location at any given time determines who they can see and hear.
This let both the student presenters, and the attendees, recreate the experience of a live poster session—walking up to someone to listen to their presentation, being able to respond and ask questions, and even being able to leave and move on to the next poster or presentation whenever the user wants.
“It’s important for students to engage socially since team-based solutions of societally important problems is at the heart of civil and environmental engineering,” Wang said. And while schools are still experiencing shutdowns or physical gatherings remain restricted, virtual events held in this manner provide students with the opportunities not only to socialize with their peers, but to also build the presentation skills that will serve them well throughout their education and future careers.
Engineering students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) also came to Gather.town for a similar reason: to move their annual Mechanical Engineering Research Exhibition (MERE) online for 2020. For the previous six years, MIT postdocs, and undergraduate students who completed projects for the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP), would come together to present a wide variety of mechanical engineering research projects with the rest of the MIT community.
“I think the posters are great examples of how our students stay passionate in their scientific research and demonstrate resilience to get through the tough times,” says Nicholas Fang, professor of mechanical engineering and faculty advisor for MERE.
Like all good poster sessions, students honed their presentation skills and shared their research passions with their peers, faculty, alumni, and others. And like CMU, with this pandemic-induced shift to online courses, virtual labs, and limited in-person events, the MERE event had to transform into a virtual experience without losing the most important parts.
The question organizers asked was, “how could they help foster the discussions that happen organically as people physically walk through poster sessions, but in virtual space?”
During the summer, the event’s organizers Crystal Owens and Maytee Chantharayukhonthorn, both graduate students in the mechanical engineering department, began looking for a virtual alternative for MERE when it became clear that the limitations on physical gatherings wouldn’t be lifted anytime soon. They wanted a platform that would give participants an experience as true-to-life as possible.
“Our main goal was to recreate the poster presentation experience, with as much person-to-person interaction as possible,” said Owens. They collected suggestions from friends and faculty, and eventually decided on Gather.town out of their final list of ten possibilities, after some demo testing by other students and faculty.
The proximity-triggered video chat at the core of Gather is what tipped the scales, because it offered the most authentic poster session experience. “Seeing people actually walking around from poster to poster, and people chatting in groups, was exactly what we were hoping would happen,” added Chantharayukhonthorn. “That sort of organic community-building experience was important to us.”
Owens built MERE’s virtual environment in Gather and arranged the presenter stations and their posters in the same manner as a live poster session, with space for attendee avatars to move through the rows between different presenters, and stop to listen as they please. Presenters’ avatars were stationed beside their posters, and attendees could click on the poster icon to open a PDF of the full display. Attendees could join existing conversations or presentations already in progress, or start a new conversation with another person.
Having the MERE event be virtual this year also meant that many more people were able to attend than could usually be present at an in-person event, including more members of the MIT community inside and outside the engineering department, and even MIT alumni from locations around the world. This afforded the engineering student participants greater exposure and the opportunity to engage with a much broader audience than a traditional poster event.
Post-Pandemic Poster Party? Not Anytime Soon
While there’s no way to know for sure, many of the changes to education this year—more online courses, virtual events, and digital socializing, to name a few—are likely to continue for the foreseeable future. This means engineering students should be prepared for more events like these, where in-person activities are made digital. Lucky for these engineering students, major and minor STEM events hosted on platforms such as ProjectBoard.World and Gather.Town are here to host engineering student events of all kinds. Done right, these virtual events and platforms offer engineering students just as many opportunities to hone their skills and show themselves and their research in a positive and engaging way, which are skills that will serve them well in their future careers.
[Full disclosure: ProjectBoard.World is developed by engineering.com.]
