Work of Art
An engineering professor mixes media to broaden STEM engagement.
By Rina Diane Caballar
Carlotta Berry is an educator by profession but an artist at heart. Her creative approaches to engineering and robotics share the excitement of STEM with diverse audiences.
In her Robot Slam Poetry videos, for instance, Berry teaches robotics theory in one-minute snippets. Her rap about the robot “Harriet Tugman” explains how encoders are used to measure robot movement, and the poem on “Rosie Sparks, the robot queen” illuminates the way sonar helps determine objects’ location.
“My STEM is for the streets” is the motto that guides Berry’s outreach. In her case, the “streets” are the social media platforms where she shares her work. She moves robotics and engineering outside of the classroom to attract members of historically marginalized communities.
“Now it’s not something hidden and foreign to them,” explains the cofounder and coleader of Black in Engineering and Black in Robotics. “More Black and Brown people from any demographic, any socioeconomic background, can say they know what a robot is.”
Berry doesn’t have a background in music or poetry, but she believes combining those art forms with a visual medium such as video helps simplify robotics. “If you can sing my song or recite my poems, you’re learning some of these concepts that may be overwhelming if I were to sit back and give a lecture on them,” she says. The Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology electrical and computer engineering professor uses the multimedia techniques in her classroom as well; she provides her YouTube site—with a Robot Slam Poetry playlist—to students as a resource.
Berry’s creativity also extends to the written word. Her first work was a robotics textbook, but she has forayed into fiction with her new book, released in summer 2022. Elevated Inferno: Monet’s Moment is a romance novel featuring a Black woman in STEM as the main character. “She’s having family problems. She isn’t getting along with her sister, and her parents had these expectations for her life that don’t line up with what she wants to do,” explains Berry.
STEM-focused romance novels are a growing niche, but online roundups include few with Black women protagonists. The idea stemmed from a brainstorming session with some of Berry’s Black woman engineering colleagues. “People still typically think about engineers as White men,” she says. “One way we can get around that is to engage people in nontraditional fashions.” Berry calls her book a “first responder fairy tale,” explaining that “if my main character is programming robots to be able to work with autistic children, she’s also a first responder. Her STEM work is also saving people and enriching their lives.”
Berry hopes that, as she highlights the experiences of women in these fields, readers “can not only embrace the challenges in our journey but also appreciate the importance of what we do.”
A young math and science whiz, Berry had set her sights on becoming a high school math teacher, following in the footsteps of her mother, who taught kindergarten. But her middle and high school teachers encouraged her to consider engineering. “I had no idea what an engineer was,” she explains. “I had to go to the library and look it up in a book because, back then, an engineer was a train conductor in my mind.” Eventually, she double-majored in the field along with math. “I wanted to have math as a fallback,” she says, so she could still teach it if she didn’t like engineering.
However, Berry found she loved engineering as much as she loved teaching, so she decided to pursue a career that melded both. The ASEE Fellow explains, “As an engineering educator, I’m feeding both of my passions.”
By merging STEM with art, Berry aims to make the fields more accessible and inclusive for all her audience members—whether they’re students in a classroom, kids scrolling YouTube, or readers curled up with a STEM-themed romance novel.
Learn more about Berry and her work at www.noiresteminist.com. Access the Robot Slam Poetry playlist at https://bit.ly/3QUNK1b.
Rina Diane Caballar is a freelance writer covering technology and its intersections with science, society, and the environment.