Welcome middle school students and teachers! Here at SMILE we hope your are excited about this year’s mechanical engineering challenge. For the last three months the team here at SMILE has been working with a group of mechanical engineering students to create your challenge. We want you to design a cable car! Sounds fun right? To help you complete the project, each week here on the blog our team of mechanical engineering students will be posting videos of their own cable car project along with helpful hints on how to make your own cable car. Next week’s post will give you more details about your cable car challenge, but first we want you to meet your team of mechanical engineer students who will help you through this process. Keep checking the blog weekly for more updates and videos!
Meet Alex:
Alex is one of our mechanical engineering students who cannot wait to post videos every week! He tells us why mechanical engineering is an awesome field with many career options. Alex also explains doing research and planning before getting started on your project may help be more successful. Here are some videos we recommend to get the brain juices flowing:
Meet Jared:
Jared knows how to crack some jokes, but he is also skillful at decoding some important engineering terms. Who is your customer for your cable car? That is an excellent question! Jared breaks down some of the requirements for the project you will be working on.
Meet Erik:
Erik loves design and build things with his hands and you can tell by his amazing wood working projects he shows off in his video. Design incorporates research and the customer as well as safety. These will all play important factors in how your final project performs.
A final word from the team:
Your mechanical engineering team is excited to work with you! They give some great tips on how to work as a team, which will be important when you work with your team on your new project. Listen carefully because they can help your project run more efficiently!
We are opening up the second day of the Winter Teacher’s Workshop to any and all interested teachers. Feel free to share this opportunity with your colleagues. See the flyer pictures above for information about the sessions offered, and register for the sessions by January 10th at the following link: https://smileosu.wufoo.com/forms/registration-deadline-500-pm-1102014/
In this activity, students will learn about lean manufacturing and how efficiency plays into manufacturing processes through sorting Lego bricks. They will discover how specificity of categorization can aid efficiency and why efficiency is important to sustainable industry. Click the title below to check out this fun and engaging activity! Organizing and Sorting Activity This activity is part one of a four part series of Legos and Industrial Engineering activities.
In this activity, students will learn how to build a voltaic pile battery, which is the oldest form of electric battery. The voltaic pile battery was invented in the 1800s by Alessandro Volta using a giant stack of alternating layers of zinc, blotting paper soaked in salt water, and silver. This battery concept is the basis of the battery that students will construct — a simple battery that uses pennies, cardboard soaked in vinegar, and zinc washers for each cell. Students will then attempt to power a small LED light and a calculator with their batteries and explore the concepts of electrical current.
Each year the SMILE program sponsors a Mechanical Engineering (ME) Senior Project, in which three ME students work with the SMILE program to engineer and build a engaging, educational machine that can be shared with middle school students all over Oregon.
Last year, we had a great team who bravely chose to take on this challenge. The team built a fully-functional Rube Goldberg machine that coordinated with the middle school SMILE clubs using videos about the planning and building process. The machine travelled to middle school challenge days around Oregon and students got the opportunity to interact with the machine.
This year, we are excited to work with a new group of ME students and provide new activities for our middle school students! It is our hope that your students will gain knowledge of the engineering and design process, and ultimately plan and build a machine. We also plan to have SMILE students interact remotely with our ME students as they go through their own planning and building process over the coming months. The ME students will be designing and constructing a cable machine that can be used to teach physical science concepts. SMILE students will similarly construct a motorized machine that can perform a specified task (more details to come soon). Then, at the regional Middle School Challenges in the spring, SMILE students will have an opportunity to share their machines, as well as interact with the ME students’ machine.
At the top of this page, you will notice there is a link to a page called “Mechanical Engineering Project.” We will be posting the videos from the ME students on this page, as well as small updates about their progress once they begin building. The page currently features the videos and information from last year’s ME project, and this year’s process overall will be very similar. We plan to feature questions and feedback from the middle school students for the ME students to answer in their videos and to help aid in the middle school students’ building process and make the experience more interactive.
Stay tuned for more information on this year’s project. Happy Engineering!
Family Math and Science Night (FMSN) activities are meant to be hands-on, engaging activities for students to do with their families. Students will also have the opportunity to share their knowledge and have a teaching moment with their families and peers. Each activity for FMSN can be easily adapted for use in a SMILE club meeting or to meet the specific needs of each SMILE club. Almost all of the materials are things that can be purchased at a grocery store, which makes these activities easy to prepare and set up for. We hope you and your students find these activities exciting and engaging!
This post includes 5 Family Math and Science Night activities. Each activity is easy to set up and does not require explanation or supervision.
Clink! is a simple example of inertia and gravity. Materials are simply a penny, playing card and a mug. Participants will set the penny on the playing card and the playing card on the mug; they then have to figure out how to get the penny into the mug without lifting the card from the mug.
Using a sheet of toilet paper and a paper clip can you make the paper clip float in a bowl of water? By simply placing a paperclip on a single sheet of toilet paper and then carefully guiding it into the water, it will float!
Participants will begin by leaning forward and resting their foreheads on the wall. Next they will put their arms at their waists and try to stand upright without bending at the knees or hips. Participants will learn about center of gravity and how it needs to shift accordingly.
Using their shoulder to hold a piece of paper against the wall, participants will try to lift their outside leg. They will be unable to do so because they will not be able to lean into the wall to lift their leg.
Placing a piece of paper arms length away from a wall, participants will stand with their heels against the wall; they will then try to pick up the sheet of paper without moving their feet or bending their knees. Participants will not be able to pick up the paper because their center of gravity will need to shift.
