UMass Arbor Team Wins First Place in PLANET Competition and Alumna Places in International Tree Climbing Competition

UMass Arbor Team Wins First Place in PLANET Competition and Alumna Places in International Tree Climbing Competition

UMass Team in First Place We would like to thank all who helped to make this year's UMass / Stockbridge PLANET Team a success. PLANET 2015 was held in Raleigh, NC and your financial support is what helped to get us there. This year there were 64 schools from across North America with over 800+ students taking part in the competition. The UMass team did very well, with six teams finishing it the top 12. The Arbor team again won first place for the third year in a row. The Arbor team consisted of UMass BS Urban Forestry student Nicolette Eicholtz, MCA and Stockbridge Arboriculture & Community Forestry student Shayne Bradford. Shayne is graduating and will be working for a MAA commercial tree care company starting this spring and Nicolette, a MCA 2015, will be back next year for PLANET 2016 in Mississippi. In addition to Arboriculture, Robert Coffman took second place in Compact Excavator Operation and Connor Reardon was third in Computer Aided...
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Schreyer introduces elementary school kids to 3D printing

Schreyer introduces elementary school kids to 3D printing

Posted on March 2nd, 2015 Tags: CAD, Schreyer, Service / Outreach   Often called the third industrial revolution, digital-based manufacturing and especially 3D printing is a technology that can enable easy (home-)production of various consumer and industrial goods. To demonstrate this technology to the next generation of designers and engineers, BCT Program Director Alexander Schreyer brought our 3D printer to Amherst’s Wildwood Elementary School. As part of the fourth- and sixth-grade IT curriculum (led by “Mr. T”, Trevor Takayama), he first demonstrated how to create printable 3D models and then let the students 3D print some of those. Many students had already designed objects using the freely available Tinkercad web app. As the images show, the 3D printer proved to be a popular addition to the classroom. All kids also took home a small 3D-printed key tag with the “WW” letters on them. In the time since this visit, the Amherst Regional School District has purchased its own 3D printer and is working...
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UMass Amherst ecologists help analyze data for Elephants Without Borders

UMass Amherst ecologists help analyze data for Elephants Without Borders

Africa’s Great Elephant Census One Year On March 2, 2015 Contact: Janet Lathrop 413/545-0444   AMHERST, Mass. – The first year of the largest-ever census of savannah elephants in Africa is drawing to a close this month, aided by wildlife ecologist Curtice Griffin and postdoctoral researcher Scott Schlossberg at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, who are analyzing data with Elephants Without Borders (EWB). The researchers are now reporting early trends for a handful of the 18 participating nations. The two-year, $8 million Pan-African elephant survey by EWB and other conservation and government organizations, funded by United States billionaire philanthropist Paul G. Allen and his sister Jody, began last February. It will form a baseline that wildlife ecologists can use to coordinate conservation efforts. Experts say the ivory trade and poaching pose serious threats and there is now a risk that savannah elephants could disappear from parts of Africa. EWB director Mike Chase presented preliminary data from Botswana last week to Tshekedi Khama, that nation’s minister of...
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