Basic Engineering School Projects
Engineering is a sophisticated field of study that involves the building of complex structures and machinery. So why would anyone teach engineering concepts to children?
Teaching basic engineering principles to children is actually a beneficial practice due to children's inherent desire to create things, reports the Museum of Science website. The practice allows students to complete hands-on experimentation and promotes the development of problem solving skills.
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Egg Drop
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The Egg Drop is one of the most widely-used engineering projects because it is highly engaging and can be completed by students across a wide array of age groups.
Provide each student with a raw egg. Tell the students that in one week they will drop their eggs from the roof of the school building. Challenge them to create a system that will keep their egg safe during it's perilous free fall to the hard, unforgiving concrete.
Most teachers apply rules to the project, the most common being that students are not allowed to simply place the egg in a box full of cotton balls. Select rules based on your students' abilities. If you are dealing with a group of young students, you may want them to use any means necessary to protect the egg. If your students are of high school age, you may want to make the project more challenging by placing material, size or weight limitations on their designs. You may provide students with scrap and office materials including cardboard, rubber bands and paperclips, or you can ask them to acquire all of their supplies from home.
Once students have been given time to complete their egg safety vehicles, inspect them as a class. Allow students to vote on whether or not each egg will break. Then drop the eggs from the roof.
Allow the students to watch as the eggs are dropped one at a time and to collect their individual drop vehicles after they have plummeted to the ground. Explore the accuracy of student predictions and discuss what made the successful egg drop apparatuses so effective.
Roller Coaster
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Allow your students to create their own roller coasters using plastic tubing and a large caliber marble. Divide students into groups and give each group a length of plastic tubing, some tape and a marble. Remind students that on roller coasters the car travels with the momentum gained off the descent from the first hill alone.
Ask students to use their desks as platforms and tape the tubing into an intricate pattern of twists, turns and loops. If your students have some experience with engineering, you can apply specific regulations to the creation of the roller coaster, including a prescriptive number of required hills or loops.
Once students have created their roller coaster, ask them to send their marble on a ride. The marble should make it through the entire roller coaster ride with just the initial momentum built on the first drop. If it can't, students need to adjust their design until that goal has been attained.
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Traffic Jam
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Allow your students to suggest modifications to the school which could eliminate class-change traffic jams. Create copies of the school floor plan, or you can use the floor plan that lists fire exits that is commonly available in every classroom. Provide each student with a copy of the floor plan and tell them that they need to mark any areas where traffic jams traditionally occur during class changes. If you have a large school, you can station your students around the halls right before the bell and have them watch the surrounding areas during change in classes to look for problem spots.
Once students have identified areas of congestion on their own, create a large class map of the school on which you mark every area that students had on their maps. Then ask the students to select one of the areas of high traffic and create a plan to alleviate the congestion typically present in that area.
You can show students pictures of complex freeway structures, including ramps and interchanges, to give them an idea of how they might go about accomplishing their goal. Ask each student to both draw a picture and write a paragraph explaining how they intend to reduce the traffic problems in their selected area. Have them present their ideas to the class and allow the class to vote on which one is the best solution.
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