Engineering Night

During the past few years our elementary school has been working on being a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) school. Every month they do an activity in class that teaches one of those skills. For example, last month they had some basic household supplies like aluminum foil, cotton balls, tape and popsicle sticks and they had to build something that would keep a piece of ice from melting for as long as possible. This month they are using the 1,300 cans that the kids donated for the Food Bank and they are doing Canstruction, which is where you build something out of the cans. It's a great team building exercise.  If you look up Canstruction you will see some really amazing projects that professionals have done.

 A few weeks ago the school hosted an Engineering night. They had 4 different types of engineers talk for a few minutes about the kind of engineering that they do and then the teachers had set up hands on engineering stations for the kids to enjoy. Our friend, Ken Williams, was there to talk about Lego robotics which was very interesting for all the boys.  There are several Lego teams here in Price that go to competitions.  They spend tons of time building programmable robots and at the competitions they have to lead their robot through various obstacle courses.

One of the stations was about Mining Engineering.  The kids had a bag with various "tools" (toothpick, pencil, paper clip etc.) that they used to "mine" the chocolate chips out of cookies.  They got points for each chocolate chip that they got out without breaking. Zac and his team the Red Hot Chili Dogs (Zac, Nathan Engar, and Colin Fausett) had tons of fun at this station. 

Tyson was very determined to build the longest plank out of dominoes. You had to stack the dominoes and see how many inches you could get it to go off the book without collapsing.  The trick was to use as few dominoes as possible but go as far as you could. Tyson's stack was in the lead until the end of the night when someone built one that went a quarter of an inch further than his. Maybe next time babe! Drake and Garrett were very excited about this station because their teacher, Mrs. Cox, was in charge of it and she had let them try it out earlier in the week.

The kids also loved the tower building with toilet paper rolls.  You built the tower as tall as you could and then took turns pulling one out, like Jenga, to see how much support you needed before it collapsed. Drake and Garrett's class has also been collecting toilet paper tubes for the past few weeks because the Second Graders are making rollercoasters out of them for one of their STEM projects.

Zac's teacher, Mrs. Johnson, was over the Electrical Engineering station.  They got to play with wires and batteries to see if they could get a small light bulb to light up. By this time in the evening Drake had gotten tired of pictures and was being a tease!

We had a very fun and educational time.  Lexi had to miss out because she was at the Middle School being judged for her Science Fair project. I am very impressed with our school and how hard they try to make learning fun for the kids.  Because of this event, I now have at least one child (Drake) who is absolutely sure he wants to be an Engineer. Go for it buddy! I'm gonna need someone to help pay for my nursing home expenses someday!