Summer SAVY, Session 1 Day 5, Industrial Engineering (3rd – 4th)
Industrial Engineers and their Families,
We’ve had a full last SAVY day! Students spent the day engaged in the Engineering Design Process or in business meetings with their companies improving the designs and planning their collaboration. Our companies included the Engineering Design Team (EDT), Engineering Potato Chips (EPC), and Industrial Engineering Team (IET)! In their companies, students continued to build a factory subsystem that moved a bag of potatoes 6ft forward and up onto a table, simulating a loading dock at a potato chip factory.
Before lunch, we tested the designs. Students operated their machines and earned a force and an ergonomics score; when added together, this indicated the subsystem’s total score. When we calculated the score by hand, 20 was the score to beat! After the first test, we felt really frustrated because ALL the initial designs failed to move the potatoes 6 ft onto the loading dock. Each company’s machine broke in some way. The beauty of the Engineering Design Process? We revise and try again! By the second test, every company had created a factory subsystem that worked and beat the score of 20.
After lunch, engineers revised before the final test. Again, all companies successfully moved the potatoes, and this time all firms lowered their overall score by adding to their designs! At the final business meeting, students wrote letters from their companies to the president of the potato chip factory.
It’s been a great week! Tonight, you might ask your engineer about their feelings and revisions throughout the day or read their letter to the president together! You can review the week’s full activities in their Engineering Notebooks and folders; some highlights include designing our predator blueprint with simple machines on Day 1 (p. 8), the Factory Design Problem (in the engineering folder) and the assembly line simulation (no handout; we created the engineering folders) on Day 2, calculating force and motion on Day 3 (p. 12), and the Engineering Design Process of factory subsystems to move the potatoes (p. 17-22).
Thanks for sharing your aspiring engineers with us for this week!