39-245
Carnegie Mellon University
Spring 2000
Matthew McGuire
Goddard Would be Proud
Description:
This exercise was for our group to come up with a way of teaching simple engineering concepts to grade school student through an activity. Our group decided to teach reaction forces using balloon powered rockets. The students were allowed to make and keep their own rockets which were assembled from simple materials such as balloons, straws, and rubber bands. For further info on the project you can see our final report.
What I learned:
This was actually a very challenging exercise. It was hard to look back at the mind of a child and try to figure out how much the child is able to understand. As engineers we are all very familiar with the concepts we were trying to convey so it was easy for us to see how things worked. Therefore, not only was it hard to choose a concepts which was not too complex, we also had to be able to explain it well enough in understandable terms to the children.