Published: September 25, 2007 08:08 am      

Inspiring to engineer

West Carter students take stab at bridge construction

OLIVE HILL — With the advice of highway engineers, eighth-grade science students at West Carter Middle School learned last week they can build surprisingly sound structures from toothpicks and gumdrops.

Deanna Miller, Kentucky Department of Highways branch manager for planning, and resident construction engineer Jeremy Brickey talked to several groups about the physical properties of arches, triangles, boxes and buttresses as they worked to inspire the students toward engineering careers. They used photos and cardboard props to demonstrate how different structures distribute weight or collapse under stress.

With an advisory to avoiding eating their building materials, the students were divided into competing groups and allowed three minutes to consult on a design for a toothpick and gumdrop bridge that could span an 8-inch gap.

“An important part of being an engineer is getting it done on time and within budget,” Miller reminded the students as they immediately began inserting the spindly spars into the confectionery connectors.

As the young builders skipped the planning phase and immediately constructed triangles and boxes, Miller explained the class was part of the Kentucky Engineering Exposure Network, which is aimed at “providing a general idea and exposure to real-world applications of math and science.”

“We want to let them know how important it is and to study it in high school because it will affect them the rest of their lives,” she added.

Their teacher, John P’Simer, said the hands-on engineering lesson is part of the inquiry-based instruction learning method, which allows students to discover scientific concepts without formal scientific training or information.

“One of the best things you can do is throw materials at students and let them solve problems,” he said. “You don’t give them a recipe or a formula. It allows them to call upon their own experience to solve the problem.”

When time was up, the small spans were subjected to a stress test as Miller loaded pencils one by one into the middle of each structure. The best of the morning’s bridge’s held 42 pencils before collapsing and the least effective design buckled under the weight of nearly a dozen.

At least one of the students seemed to be paying attention to the entire presentation, while others stacked their books or wrote notes as Miller and Brickey told them about different jobs performed by engineers and the education required to qualify for the work. Nearly all of them, however, paid attention as the conversation turned to the physics of a NASCAR raceway’s banked curves or the design of roller coasters.

Page Tackett and Ashley Owens, both 13, said they most enjoyed the bridge-building exercise, although they weren’t tremendously interested in the conceptual part of the lesson.

TIM PRESTON can be reached at (606) 326-2651 or tpreston@dailyindependent.com