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Photo By Elham Sliman
Greg Schoof, manager of student programs, demonstrates proper Segway transporter technique.
All the right moves
Elham Sliman
What has two wheels, recruits potential engineering students without making any noise and is raising a lot of eyebrows all across campus? A 5- and-1/2-foot, 83-pound, battery-operated, advanced motor scooter called the Segway Human Transporter.
The Segway is a simple transporting machine built by Dean Kaman in 1999. Its top speed is 12 miles per hour—and it can go up to four hours on a single charge.
A Segway has made its way to Cleveland State University’s Fenn College of Engineering after catching the eyes of Dean Charles Alexander.
The college purchased the machine in November 2004 using donations and gift funds. With a $4,000 price tag, the Segway iSeries isn’t just a mobility tool, it is also a tool for teaching and recruiting engineering students.
Alexander heard about the scooter through a nightly news program, and thought the Segway could be useful on campus in several ways.
Being the only Segway on campus, and the second device of its kind to be sold in the city of Cleveland, the transporter can be seen all across campus as it is operated by Greg Schoof, manager of student programs at the Fenn College of Engineering.
Because Schoof’s job entails recruiting engineering students, he uses the transporter as a main focus of his presentations. As the most visible person on campus using the scooter, the College of Engineering has renamed its model the “Gregway,” says Alexander.
“We use the device to teach them about different principles of engineering…it works on the theory of how a pendulum works…we explain all the different forms of engineering that went into building it as well as the physics principles that go into what keeps the machine balanced,” says Schoof.
Alexander says, “It’s a wonderful engineering challenge for students…to ask them how it works. It looks like something that can’t work…an engineering student looks and says, ‘Wow, how’d that happen?’…they really try to analyze it and see how it works. We are just capturing that natural curiosity…to get them to start thinking about how it was invented. We take it and say, ‘This is what we do.’”
When asked how he best explains to curious students how the machine works, Alexander says, “It’s much like balancing a pencil on your finger…only you’re the pencil.”