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.
This year’s High School Challenge event will be held on February 13 and 14, 2014 at OSU, and it will focus on the complex topic of Marine Protected Areas. Here are two introductory lessons that provide a general overview into what Marine Protected Areas are and how they work! Click the titles below to access the lesson plans.
We are reinvigorating the SMILE newsletter tradition! Every quarter, we will be releasing a short newsletter with activities, updates, and other pertinent information for your SMILE club. To access the winter newsletter, click here!
We need your help in making the newsletter more interactive and engaging! Newsletters are an excellent way for clubs to share what they are doing with other SMILE clubs, families, and OSU staff through stories and updates. We are looking to clubs to contribute short pieces about meeting activities with 1 to 2 pictures to be included in the newsletter. Writing a newsletter entry would be a great follow-up for students for a club meeting and a way for them to share what they learned.
The next SMILE newsletter will come out in March 2014. If you have any activities, stories, or pictures that you would like to share to be featured in an upcoming newsletter, please send them to Abbe at abbe.lougee@oregonstate.edu.
SMILE is now on Facebook! Like our page to receive updates on new blog posts, teacher workshops, middle and high school challenges, and other information about the SMILE Program. You can also share summaries, new ideas, and/or pictures about your SMILE clubs’ activities and projects. Visit https://www.facebook.com/osu.smile.1 to like the page and stay updated! (Note: in order to receive updates and post on the SMILE Facebook page, you must have a Facebook account.)
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.
This activity was provided by high school club leader Ken Dicky. It adds to the sampling concepts taught in the halibut unit with a sample-to-population-inference activity. It is a chance to do some basic math (statistics) and eat food at a club meeting! Along with the activity worksheet you will find teacher notes with specifics on leading it during a club meeting. Ken says: “It was fun, valuable, and took about 1 hour”.
