E-Week Part Deux

As you already know, it's National Engineers Week! Each year, Raytheon hosts groups of middle and high school students from the community. Unfortunately, there was a snow storm where dropped several inches which delayed and even cancelled school (wimps). But the devoted young yearned students yearned to learn about engineering and even showed up on a snow day!

The students were shown four various disciplines of engineer, Mechanical, Systems, Electrical, and Software, each had their own activity. Mechanical and Systems Engineering both had competitions for the students. For Systems, they were tasked to build a rollercoaster with the largest loop(s) using the least amount of money (set by type of material). They were given certain requirements that they had to build to and with the limited amount of time, planning was critical. The students seemed to really enjoy the activity and the teachers taught it was a great lesson especially for planning since the cost of materials increased with number of visits to the "store". The competition between schools and groups definitely motivate the students.

For the Electrical and Software aspects, they had objectives to debug an Arduino program and wired a single digit LED display and speakers. Luckily for them, as devoted future engineers, there was not as many students as we expected so they got to take their Arudino Uno Board home! And a lucky six people won engineering books through a raffle!

What a great time! Oh yeah, there was free pizza!