Summer SAVY, Session 6 Day 5, Intro to Engineering (Shuman & Green) (5th-6th)
We finished off our week of Introduction to Engineering with chemical and biological engineering. Through learning about the world’s worst industrial disaster, the Bhopal Union Carbide Disaster, students grasped the importance of designing processes and plants with safety as the highest priority. Students also discovered the chemical processes that make PET, an extremely common polymer that is used in fabrics, plastic bottles, carpets, and many other things.
In today’s project, students cleaned up an oil spill (made of Crisco and cocoa powder) in a bowl of water and learned ways that chemical and biological engineers have developed to clean up oil spills in our oceans. Students learned about how chemical engineers can design processes that take raw chemicals and combine them in processes that create useful final products in the same way that mechanical engineers take raw materials and turn them into useful things.
We read a disgustingly fun book called The Great Stink by Colleen Paeff. From this book, we learned about how Joseph Bazalgette solved London’s poop pollution problem. This was a problem that began all the way back in 1500 and continued to 1866 when cholera outbreaks continued to hit but did not travel all throughout London thanks to Bazalgette’s evidence that water pollution is what was contributing to these cholera outbreaks.
After lunch, we learned about biological engineering, including biomedical, biological systems, and biomimetics, and the challenges that are waiting for future biological engineers (maybe some of whom were in this class) to solve. We learned how prosthetics work, and we talked about The Great Stink. To finish the day and this week, we discussed the hard and soft skills that an engineer needs to be successful. Students completed a “chalk talk” where they responded to questions on a large piece of paper and engaged with their peers’ responses as well. The questions the students answered are below and are great questions to ask your students:
- What is an engineer?
- What does an engineer do?
- What main types are there?
- What are the differences between them?
- What are the Grand Challenges? Which one(s) interests you the most? What are engineers currently trying to do to solve them? What would you do?
- What qualities do you think an engineer has?
Students asked excellent questions and were told about the opportunity to shadow engineers to learn more about a particular subtype of engineering.
Dinner Table Questions:
- What type of engineering interests you the most? What kind of classes do you think they have to take?
- Which subtype of biological engineering makes prosthetics, and how do they work?
- How can we use Gecko feet to make better adhesives?
- What does it take to be an engineer?
We had a wonderful week with your students and hope they enjoyed learning more about engineering! It is exciting to think about the future engineers that might have spent the week with us! Keep asking questions, thinking about how to make things better, and getting comfortable with productive failure!
Warmly,
Ms. Green and Mr. Shuman