ASAP hosted a laboratory visit by some members of the FSU's Women in Math, Science, and Engineering (WIMSE). WIMSE is a living-learning community (LLC) on campus that supports the growth and development of women in the STEM fields at the Florida State University (FSU). Richard Twumasi-Boakye and Ryan Doczy, both doctoral candidates and research assistants at ASAP, took the group of six WIMSE students through research activities at the ASAP's Driving Simulator Laboratory at the FAMU-FSU College of Engineering.
The laboratory visit lasted for one hour, involving three interactive sessions. The first session comprised a brief introduction to the research focus of the ASAP transportation center as well as the purposes, features, and uses of the DriveSafety Driving Simulator. The second session included a discussion of transportation engineering, with a clear narration of essential concepts related to driver decisions, such as vehicle speeds, permitted left-turn movements, and gap acceptance. After this brief "lesson" in transportation engineering, a short written "quiz" was done, which involved students being tested on decisions on whether or not to make a permitted left-turn movement based on their calculated headways from a given traffic flow. The final session included a presentation of on-going ASAP research projects which incorporated the use of the Driving Simulator, as well as the students being given turns to have a hands-on experience in operating the Driving Simulator - a very exciting feature of the visit for most of the students.