Engineering A Bridge To Careers

GWU Event Offers Hands-On Lessons

The hallway was a miniature construction site, with piles of steel, rubber mallets, and nuts and bolts scattered across the floor. The six high school students were huddled in a circle, conferring on how best to approach the challenge.

After a brief deliberation, they divided into groups, with some students jumping into the manual labor and others issuing orders to one another about the design.

Their task? To construct a 20-foot-long bridge with steel pieces and a box of rudimentary tools in less than 15 minutes.

The exercise was part of a science, technology and engineering exploration day Tuesday at the Ashburn campus of George Washington University. The purpose of the second annual event, open to Loudoun County sophomores, juniors and seniors, was to expose students to careers in engineering.

Over the course of the day, GWU faculty and graduate students led about 100 high-schoolers through a dozen sessions, where they had the opportunity to build a bridge, simulate an earthquake, create a robot, track hackers breaking into a computer system, learn how wireless technology works and digitize a crash-test dummy.

For many students, it was a chance to get hands-on experience outside the classroom, said Joan Ziemba, a GWU spokeswoman.

"What we really wanted to do was to create something that had some energy to it," said Ziemba, who worked closely with Loudoun County public school system to create the program.

"For the student who knows what he or she wants to do, this reinforces it. For the student who wants to be an engineer but may not know what type of engineer, they see something like this, and it comes into focus for them," Ziemba said.

During the hour-long bridge-building session, Barbara Myklebust, assistant dean of GWU's School of Engineering and Applied Science, walked about a dozen students through the basics of civil engineering. Civil engineers can be creative, she said, but their responsibility is to a customer, and they are expected to follow a budget and a timeline. Above all, civil engineers must create a structure that is safe and reliable, she said.

When it came time for the hands-on part of the session, Myklebust broke the students into two groups and explained that they would take turns competing to build the bridge. As soon as the stopwatch started, the first group began sliding steel pieces together with little discussion. After a few minutes, the students had assembled two 20-foot-long beams. Myklebust said that their strategy, although speedy, was probably not optimal.

"With high school students, they often jump into a project without planning out what would be the best approach," she said.

Within minutes, the students realized that they had attached the steel pieces incorrectly. As they scrambled to reassemble the pieces, time ran out. As the second group of students began, it was clear that they had learned from the previous group's mistakes. But even with their planned approach, they were unable to beat the clock.

Myklebust later asked the students what they had learned from the exercise and what they would do differently if given another chance.

"We needed more people and more time," said Zack Dixon, a senior at Freedom High School who came with his physics class and is interested in becoming a civil or mechanical engineer.

"Next time, I would work together instead of having separate groups," said Pushpit Thohan, a senior at Heritage High School who is interested in chemical engineering.

"If we tried it again, we would definitely be able to do it," he added.