Corsham School held at STEM day on the 8th January 2016 and three members of WESBath (Jemma Rowlandson, Leen Jabban and myself) were invited to organise a hands-on workshop for year 9 students with the object to create awareness and generate interest about engineering. The task for the day was to build a tower at least 45cm tall with paper straws and balance a beaker of water on top of it.
The main objective of this task was to get the students to think which shape was strong enough to withstand the force and most of the teams figured out that triangles offered better resistance.We worked with two separate groups of 20 students – in the first session an all girls’ team won the task and were able to balance 950g of water on their tower. In the second session a team of boys were successful in balancing 1.10kg of water, which was the highest capacity for that day as well. There were prizes for the winning teams and a prize for the best team name which was Ninjaneers!
The half-day session also helped us to educate the students about various branches of engineering and it was not all about just ‘fixing things’. The students were excited that there was more to engineering and some of them even expressed interest in taking up engineering in the future.
As a team, we hope to have changed the perception of engineering and STEM to these students!
Parimala Shivaprasad
PhD Research Programme in Chemical Engineering, Dept of Chemical Engineering
Respond