Abstract
A growing challenge in the United States is ensuring equal access to high quality STEM education that will prepare students for increasingly technical careers. While hands on learning tools have been shown to improve conceptual understanding and student engagement, access to and availability of these resources varies widely across school districts and states. Public school funding in the U.S. is heavily influenced by local property taxes, leading to significant disparities in funding between wealthy and under resourced districts. These inequalities limit the ability of many schools to provide interactive learning tools and experiential opportunities that are critical for an effective STEM education. On top of that, engineering and broader STEM education often struggles to teach abstract theoretical concepts such as dynamic systems and control theory. Educational tools like a rotary inverted pendulum can help bridge this gap by allowing students to visualize and interact with complex systems in real time.
Together, these issues point to a broader problem: how can the U.S. ensure that advances in engineering education are both effective and equitably accessible?
The overarching goal of the rotary inverted pendulum (RIP) capstone project is to address a gap in engineering education by developing a hands on teaching aid capable of demonstrating complex dynamics and control systems concepts. The RIP is a mechatronic system consisting of three main parts: a controller, a sensor, and an actuator. A Propeller 2 microcontroller running a custom Spin 2 program was used as the controller, a brushless DC servomotor was used as the actuator, and two quadrature encoders were used track the system’s angular position. Using these components as well as proportional, integral, and derivative (PID) control system to balance a pendulum arm, the RIP capstone team was able to construct a working device that includes novel teaching aid features.
The final device successfully demonstrated stable control behavior and provided a physical means for visualizing key principles such as feedback loops, system response, and instability. Graduate faculty feedback indicated an interest in using the RIP into graduate level coursework, appreciating its potential to enhance student understanding through interactive learning. The RIP project shows that well designed mechatronic systems can serve as effective educational tools, when educational features are properly integrated, which will improve students’ comprehension of highly theoretical concepts.
The STS research project researches how structural inequalities in U.S. public school funding affect access to educational resources. The central research question asks: how do funding disparities shape the availability of learning tools and opportunities across different school districts? Drawing on state and local government policy analysis and existing data on school funding mechanisms, the research argues that reliance on local property taxes creates significant inequities in spending across different school districts which ends up disproportionately disadvantaging students in Lower income communities. These inequalities can be seen in reduced access to more complex coursework, up to date technology, and other learning opportunities that are critical for effective education.
Evidence from funding reports and educational outcome data shows a strong tie between resource availability and student achievement, especially in technical subjects that benefit from hands on learning. As a result, students in underfunded districts are less likely to develop the practical skills and conceptual understanding needed for success in engineering and related fields. The paper finds that without structural reform to funding models, important tools in engineering education, such as a rotary inverted pendulum, will keep being distrbuted unevenly, which will reinforce existing educational and socioeconomic inequalities rather than alleviating them.
