Summer SAVY, Session 5 Day 5, Engineering Design (Lewis) (1st-2nd)
Engineering Design started our final day with a guest speaker, Craig Shuman, a mechanical engineer. The students had amazing questions for him. They found out that he uses math and science in his job, works with forces and Newton’s 3rd Law of Motion, and even makes mistakes. He explained how he uses the Engineering Design Process and works with teams, just like we are doing this week!
The bulk of the middle of our day was spent constructing, testing, and improving bridges with our teams. The bridges needed to be at least 4.5 inches tall, span 15 inches, and be strong enough for a toy car to pass safely. These bridges could be constructed with only specific materials (craft sticks, straws, tape, index cards, paper clips, paper, tape, and string) and not fall below the failure line. We found out that we needed to do lots of testing and improving our designs because our ideas do not always work when we try them in real life.
We also teamed up with the other section of Engineering design and walked around the Vanderbilt campus on a civil engineering scavenger hunt. Our teams looked for abutments, balance and symmetry, spans, columns and piers, arches, and bridges. We explored and found two bridges built for pedestrians over the road. It was fun to find what we’ve been learning about in a real-life environment!
We finished up our day by presenting our bridges to the other class and the SAVY staff. We all showed how we were able to meet the criteria by asking questions, imagining different ideas, testing and improving our designs. We were very impressed by the way students persevered with such a challenging task.
It was such a pleasure teaching each of our students. They are all very cool kids with great ideas and an excitement for learning. What a joy this week has been! Thank you for sending them to Engineering Design at SAVY!
Mrs. Lewis and Ms. Sharon