This award provides support for a three-year REU Site at the University of Virginia (UVA). The REU site builds upon prior experience over the last three years on a successful REU center at UVA. This program focuses on teaching design skills to students through research. The program also seeks to introduce such design experiences to 10 undergraduate students, over a ten-week summer program that elicits their participation in research, educational, and social implications studies. Special features of this REU include the presence of design experience as a central component of each sub-project, the use of a research team model that includes peers and mentors, the use of a structured REU training program to encourage interest in students for graduate studies, and the inclusion of social and educational perspectives within these design experience projects, so that the undergraduate students may be motivated by the broader implications, and learn by developing educational materials for lab courses within current curricula.
