A couple of weeks ago, I volunteered to speak at a
local elementary school as part of National Engineering
Week. ASME (American Society of Mechanical
Engineers) put out a call to all the local members and I
was one of many members who responded. Lynn
Guest, an ME at IBM, acted as matchmaker between
the schools and the engineers.
Big thanks to Buzz Kross and his admin, Lucille Collins,
who donated enough tape measure key chains and
Autodesk pens to the entire group of fourth graders - 9
and 10 year olds. For my presentation, I discussed the
difference between concentrated and distributed
weight, how engineers calculate force on an object,
talked about the recent discovery about M&Ms vs.
gumballs, and demo'd how to design a chair using
Inventor on my laptop. We finished up with an
engineering assignment for the students. Each student
was given marshmallows and pretzels. Their task to
build the highest tower, using what they had learned
about weight distribution. The tower had to be stable.
The winner came in at almost 7 inches! The winner got
a miniature flashlight I had picked up at an engineering
conference.
Today I got a packet of thank you letters from the
students and thought I would share some excerpts from
their letters...
How do you make your laptop design a chair? Does it
have to be a special laptop?
I liked what you said of being an engineer and also
getting alot of money!
You are a great mechanical engineer!
I still have a few questions: How much money do
you get each week? How much jobs have you had in
the past? How old are you really?
Because I talked a little about when I worked at
NUMMI, I also got these questions:
How many cars does [NUMMI] make in a year?
How long would it take two robots to make three cars?
I might be a mechanical engineer because I like
making stuff and it's very cool. Is it hard to make a
chair? When you were first working, was it hard?
I liked the part where we built the towers. It was
hard to make it stand too, but I figured how to make it
stand. First you put the marshmallow on the table.
Then brake two pretzel sticks in half. And then put 1
half of the stick in the marshmallow then repeat until
you run out of marshmallows and pretzel sticks. That
was a fun time.
When you showed us the computer demo, that was
cool!
Mechanical engineering looks like a tough career,
but the marshmallow and pretzels were tasty.
The [Autodesk] pen is really useful for me and I
wrote from that pen for about twenty or ten minutes.
My favorite part was when you were making the
chair on the Autodesk computer.
Surprising to me was that just about every student said
watching how Inventor works was their favorite part.
Hey, Inventor beats marshmallows and pretzel sticks -
how's that for a slogan?
When you first install ADT2005, read the dialogs! There
is helpful, and even important information on each one.
I know it is very easy to get into the habit of pressing
OK without reading the text, but you really aren't doing
yourself any favors.