From the route students take to school to the transportation systems that move people and goods across entire regions, everyday mobility depends on decisions, coordination, technology, and infrastructure that often go unnoticed.
Through the hands-on outreach program STEaM Tech, Virginia Tech’s System Performance Laboratory team is helping young learners see transportation not simply as something they use, but as a complex system they can understand, question, and help improve.
At the center of STEaM Tech — short for science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics — is a railway-based case study, realized as an interactive exhibit at Virginia Tech’s Academic Building One in Alexandria. Trains are familiar to many students, which makes them an effective starting point for introducing systems thinking, decision-making, automation, and safety. Through the program, students explore how transportation systems depend not only on vehicles and infrastructure, but also on people, communication, planning, technology, and real-time decisions.
For Maria Tomai, a postdoctoral associate, and Yasmin Mashayekhy Fard, a Ph.D. candidate, providing visibility is exactly what they hope to change through their work on the program. As part of the System Performance Laboratory team, they are pulling back the curtain on everyday transportation systems, sparking curiosity, and encouraging young people to discover fields they are passionate about and may want to pursue in their future careers.
“We want to help students see transportation not just as something they use to move around, but as a complex socio-technical system they can understand, question, and eventually help improve,” Tomai said. “Model trains give us a tangible and playful way to make such a system visible, showing how tracks, signals, schedules, people, and technologies interact, and how one decision in one part of the system can affect everything else.”
The program was developed within the Grado Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering under the guidance of System Performance Laboratory Director Kostas Triantis and Co-Director Joseph Godfrey, with contributions from faculty members, researchers, graduate students, postdoctoral scholars, volunteers, and community partners. The outreach project was funded by Vibrant Virginia, support that enabled the laboratory team to translate its transportation and human-automation research into a hands-on educational program for students and community participants.
STEaM Tech builds on an National Science Foundation-funded research effort conducted by the System Performance Laboratory over the past five years. That work has focused on safety-critical transportation systems, infrastructure resilience, learning from errors and near misses, and human-automation interaction. Drawing from this research foundation, the team developed STEaM Tech to translate complex engineering ideas into activities that are accessible, collaborative, and engaging for younger audiences.
The location of the program strengthens the learning experience. Academic Building One in Alexandria is surrounded by multiple transportation systems, including Metro and rail lines, roads, pedestrian pathways, waterways, and nearby air transportation. Students can observe the transportation environment around them and connect those observations to activities inside the workshop.
