Our WEngineer STEM Exploration Summer Camp 2022 ended last friday! The students had a wonderful time participating in various challenges and activities. Students were able to apply their knowledge throughout the week and gain points, competing for the academy winner title!
In the first lesson, students participated in an icebreaker challenge: they were tasked to build a tower from sticky notes. The tower had to support the weight of a water bottle, which was placed on top. The students did an incredible job by creating innovative designs and all groups completed the challenge. Students then reflected on the challenge and learned about the engineering design process, civil engineering, and environmental engineering. Afterwards, they participated in a disaster house challenge where they constructed a house using basic materials that was meant to stay strong and protect the residents against natural disasters that were stimulated by the WEngineer instructors.
In the second lesson, students focused on drawings and engineering planning skills. To begin the lesson, students reflected on their designs from the Disaster House challenge and practiced drawing them. Afterward, students learned about engineering drawings of many types, including multi-view drawings, isometrics, and obliques. The students were able to practice these drawings using graph paper and follow along with the demonstrations conducted by the instructors. Then students put their drawing skills to use in the ShWErk Tank Challenge, where they designed innovative products and presented them to the instructors. They were then judged on the products and provided WE-Points accordingly. Overall, the students created intriguing designs and used their drawing skills to make accurate drawings for their products.
In the third lesson, students went through an extensive overview of electrical engineering, where they learned about logic gates and expressions, truth tables, series and parallel circuits, resistance, and ohm’s law. Students also participated in several challenges, where they competed against each other to figure out logic expressions, identified different types of circuits, and solved them by finding their resistance, voltage, and current. Later, in the second half of the lesson, students learned about binary numbers and how computers read numbers. Then, students participated in challenges where they converted decimal numbers into binary and vice versa. To conclude the lesson, students participated in a mixed review challenge where they applied all the knowledge they gained from the electrical engineering lessons earlier in the day.
In the fourth lesson, students were introduced to the topic of bridges. Students began this lesson with a brainstorming session on what they thought a bridge would look like. They used their knowledge of isometric drawings to complete an isometric sketch of a bridge. After learning about a variety of bridge designs, going over why a bridge is designed like it is, and the principles involved with bridges, Students were challenged to build their own bridge. They were once again tasted to sketch their bridges out, but this time they had to make their drawing come to life! Students were given a variety of materials and constructed a bridge that spanned 9 inches across two desks. These bridges were then put to the test. Weights were used to judge the strength of the bridge design and every groups’ bridge passed! We are so proud of all of the groups and their innovations!
In the fifth and final lesson of the academy, students came into the classroom beaming for our final topic of the academy. Students were introduced to Aerospace Engineering. We discussed a variety of different aircraft types: Boeing and Airbus commercial aircrafts, military aircrafts, Lockhead Martin aircrafts, etc. We then transitioned into a discussion of how flight works. We discussed lift and thrust. Went over the parts of an airplane’s wing that helps aid in a plane’s lift and control in the air. We discussed the various functions of military aircrafts and even played a small mini game in which students were asked to identify an array of aircrafts presented on the slide. We concluded the last topic of our session with a video that addresses all of the points that were aforementioned and went over sketches of a commercial airplane.
Finally, in the second half of the lesson, students participated in an exciting jeopardy as they went through an intensive review of the various topics they learned throughout the academy. Even with very challenging questions, students were able to work as a team to figure out the answer to the problems they chose! With each team putting in all of their effort, there was a lot of competition, with teams being separated by only a few points! However, at the end of the jeopardy, Team “The Winners” (Aedan, Syed, Ben, Gabriel) won with 921 WE-Points, only 10 points more than the second place team. As a prize, each team member will be receiving a 3D-printed model of an F22 Raptor Fighter Jet.
We appreciate the hard work and dedication these students displayed in the challenges presented throughout this academy. We are so proud of each and every one of them!
Below are a few pictures from the academy detailing their projects throughout the academy as well as some photos from lessons.
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