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By Jonathan Goldstein

Gary Ybarra had no idea where he would find $9,600 to buy the 64 computers about to become part of a fire sale in Cary, North Carolina, but he knew he had to get his hands on those machines. He couldn't bear the thought of some other business snapping up the IBMs that a closing high-tech firm was planning to unload, especially with so many schools in the area desperate to improve their technology. So Ybarra, an electrical engineering professor at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, persuaded the company to give him dibs on the $150 computers and decided he would figure out how to pay for them later. "It was just too good to pass up," recalls Ybarra, who donated the computers to six elementary schools and eventually won a grant to cover the cost. "I was planning to take out a home equity loan if I had to."

Ybarra's friends and colleagues say that story perfectly illustrates his efforts over the past decade to share his love of science and engineering with children as well as college students. It also reveals how far Ybarra (pronounced Why-bear-uh) will go for teachers and kids. "He just has this passion for what he does," says Kristine Johnson, dean of Duke's Pratt School of Engineering, where Ybarra also serves as director of undergraduate studies for the department of electrical and computer engineering. "To me, he's like the Coach Krzyzewski of engineering," referring to NCAA-championship-winning Duke basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski.

Born in Hampton, Virginia and raised in Sacramento, California, Ybarra received B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from North Carolina State University in Raleigh. For years, he worked informally with Raleigh-Durham area teachers to help introduce children to the scientific concepts that underlie engineering and much of modern society. He fired low-power laser beams across classrooms to explain the properties of light, showed students how to build simple switches so they would understand electricity, and described how gravity keeps our feet on the ground and our planet in orbit.

Now, Ybarra can't help smiling as he describes his time in area classrooms. After talking a few minutes, he jumps to his feet, pulling a small laser from his desk and recreating a lesson he once taught. Hands moving in sweeping motions, he explains how various lenses can scatter or focus a beam of light. When teaching, whether in front of a class or a single person, Ybarra is clearly in his element. He has learned, to his great satisfaction, that his enthusiasm is more contagious than the flu. "Generating this passion for learning is the focus of all my programs," he states.

About four years ago, Ybarra learned of a National Science Foundation (NSF) program that would help him expand his audience to thousands of children a year. He grabbed the opportunity. In 1999, with a $340,000 NSF grant and help from others at Duke and N.C. State, Ybarra created an "engineering teaching fellows" program that sends college students into elementary and middle schools in and around the Triangle (Durham-Raleigh-Chapel Hill area) to augment science lessons. Last year, the program involved more than two dozen graduate and undergraduate engineering students from Duke and N.C. State, who worked with about 4,000 children in nine schools. Kids in the program build bridges out of gumdrops and toothpicks, design and operate marshmallow-firing catapults, and attach tiny harnesses to beetles to see how much weight the insects can pull. All of it helps them understand the forces that make things work.

Children in some of those classes say they have never learned so much about science -- or enjoyed it so much. "I've always loved science, but this has helped me to love it a whole bunch more," says Jack Wheless, a fifth-grader at Raleigh's Washington Elementary School. "Pretty soon, we're going to make terrariums and aquariums out of Coke bottles."

Encouraged by success in the program's first two years, Ybarra plans to ask NSF for a $1 million renewal of the grant this year. He also recently won a $167,500 grant from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund to start an after-school science and engineering program at Durham's Rogers-Herr Middle School. That too will involve Duke engineering students helping children explore science.

Despite his grounding in the serious work of engineering, where millimeters matter, Ybarra admits he isn't so different from many of the children he teaches. His office is full of ceramic bunnies, plastic fighter planes, and tiny toy dinosaurs. He builds and launches model rockets at the ten-acre spread he shares with his wife, Nancy. And his personal web page is full of goofy closeup photos of his three beloved dogs as well as seals, a rhino, and other animals he photographed at the state zoo in nearby Asheboro. "I'm still a kid," he claims, smiling. "I'll always be a kid." As a youngster -- admittedly a 41-year-old one with a slightly receding hairline -- Ybarra knows how lame science can be with a dull teacher. He also learned early on how fun it can be with a great teacher.

One of the most influential teachers in Ybarra's past was Alton Bethea, a fun-loving, elderly physics teacher at Pinecrest High School in Southern Pines, North Carolina. Through hands-on experiments that kept his students moving, Bethea proved to a 16-year-old Ybarra in 1977 that physics and other sciences can be fascinating and thoroughly understandable. Ybarra remembers students shooting plastic darts at a falling ball in Bethea's class as the teacher demonstrated how gravity makes objects fall at the same rate. Years later, Ybarra came to understand the value of those lessons, which were reinforced by one of his professors at N.C. State.

"I realized that most kids haven't been introduced to science in a way that makes it fun to learn," Ybarra says. "I want to be a part of future generations who find a love of learning and especially of science and engineering." And every time he sees a kid grasp a scientific concept, Ybarra knows he has passed on the same gift of understanding that an old physics teacher gave him 24 years ago.

Reprinted with permission of The News & Observer of Raleigh, North Carolina. Jonathan Goldstein is a staff writer for the newspaper.

Progressive Engineer
Editor: Tom Gibson
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©2004 Progressive Engineer