Issue link: http://uwashington.uberflip.com/i/193116
Outreach (cont'd) PACTRANS ENGAGES HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS IN TRANSPORTATION RESEARCH AT OREGON STATE UNIVERSITY Two local High School Students, Tiernan Peitsch and Carolina Guillen, participated in the Summer Experience in Science and Engineering for Youth (SESEY) program at Oregon State University during the week of July 15, 2013. The students spent the week studying transporation safety with project mentors Dr. David Hurwitz and PhD candidate Mafruhatul Jannat (Medha). Specifically, the students conducted a field evaluation of the influence of distraction on pedestrian behaviors such as compliance with traffic control devices and walking speeds. They selected crosswalks on the OSU campus, collected HD video of pedestrian behaviors, transcribed the video data into spreadsheets, and analyzed the results. At the end of the week they presented their results in a poster session on the OSU campus. High school students with their project mentor (left) final poster. Left to right: Mafruhatul Jannat, Carolina Guillen, and Tiernan Peitsch PACTRANS INTERNS PRODUCED AN AMAZING ANDROID PHONE APP As part of PacTrans' outreach activities, PacTrans started a summer intern program in 2013 to attract talented high school and college students to study and work on transportationrelated issues. The first two students recruited to this program were Kevin Yang, an incoming high school junior at the Lakeside School in Seattle, and Jinglan Wang, an incoming sophomore at Wellesley College. Both students had demonstrated their talents by winning numerous awards in mathematics competitions. Kevin won third place in Mathcounts National Competition in 2011 and received honorable mentions in both the United States of America Mathematical Olympiad (USAMO) 2013 and the United States of America Physics Olympiad (USAPO) 2013. Jinglan also is a talented athlete who won fourth place in the US Rowing Youth National Championships in 2012 when she was the captain of the Lakeside School's crew team. The two interns worked closely together at the Smart Transportation Applications and Research Laboratory (STAR Lab) of the University of Washington over the summer and produced an Android phone app called PacTrans' summer interns Jinglan Wang and Kevin Yang on the UW campus in Seattle 30 Pacific Northwest Transportation Consortium Seattle Bus Buddy, available for download at the Google Play Store at https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com. starlab.busbuddy. The idea for Bus Buddy was born when Jinglan continuously napped through her bus stop, much to Kevin's amusement. They decided that many Seattleites likely faced a similar issue and set to work. The application they created allows users to set a GPS-enabled alarm for their respective bus stops to eliminate the worry about missing them. This application is meant to benefit all public transit users, especially those who are visually impaired. With data support from Sound Transit, the pre-installed accessibility options on the Android phone allow the user to navigate and the application conveniently. They hope to someday develop an iPhone version and a Windows Phone version, or that the open source app will capture the interest of other developers who are willing to optimize it for various cities and languages. The summer interns with STAR Lab researcher Yingying (Rebecca) Zhang in the UW STAR Lab