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EWeek 2006 ENews #16 – February 10, 2006
National Engineers Week 2005 will be celebrated February 20-26. Feel free to forward this letter or contents to other interested parties. Contents:1. Hurricanes Influence Future City Competition Students 1. Hurricanes Influence Future City Competition Students Teams of seventh- and eighth-grade students from 31 regions across the country have created detailed – often fantastic – cities of tomorrow that give intriguing insights to how young minds envision their future. At the same time, their bold designs and innovative concepts provide a refreshingly optimistic appreciation of how our nation can realistically deal with the many challenges facing its cities, including environmental disasters, crime, urban decay and urban sprawl. The devastation of Hurricane Katrina affected teams from the southeast to land-locked Arizona. The North Carolina team, for example, located their city on an island in the middle of a lake in the middle of the continent so they could completely avoid the threat of hurricanes. For Louisiana's winning team, Katrina was impossible to escape. As Tony Arikol, the engineer mentor who helped guide St. Thomas More School of Baton Rouge to win their state's regional competition with a redesigned New Orleans, put it, "The stakes, in my mind, are a lot closer to home." "We call our city "N.O.R.A.: New Orleans Reigns Again," explains Katherine Fredieu, who turned 14 last September just as the Crescent City was flooded. "The name symbolizes a second chance at building a thriving city." (Ironically, a team from St. Thomas More won the 2005 Future City National Finals with a floating city off the coast of Louisiana able to withstand a Category 5 hurricane.) Even far away in Phoenix, Katrina had an impact on the students' future cities. "We discussed New Orleans," says Mark Wingert, a teacher at Ira Murphy Middle School, winners of the Phoenix regional. "It's a case in point for when you haven't planned adequately for the future. When my students created their city this year, they made sure we had an evacuation plan." Regional competition winning teams receive an all-expenses-paid trip to Washington for the Future City National Finals, hosted by Bentley Systems, Incorporated, a leading engineering software company. Grand prize is a week at US Space Camp in Huntsville, Alabama. Some 30,000 students from more than 1,000 schools participated in 2005-06. 2. 2006 EWEEK Poster Art Auction to Help Louisiana's Future City Schools 3. This Week Online 4. In Local News The College of Engineering and Natural Sciences at Northern Arizona University is hosting an E-Day through Student Ambassadors on February 24. Students from regional high schools have been invited to attend this day-long event. What Makes a Bicycle? Engineers Week kicks off in Edina, Minnesota, at Southdale Center on February 18. The Society of Women Engineers will demonstrate how the parts of the bicycle work together to move the bicycle forward, turn and stop. Also at this event, make Silly Putty®, light up a light bulb, and create a merry-go-round with LEGOs. On February 25 it's CHEMFEST!! The Works – Edina Community Center. SWE-Minnesota has collaborated with the Institute of Technology Alumni Society (ITAS) K-12 Outreach Committee to support the second annual "Day at The Works." And, on February 23 its "Sparks, Slime, and Speed – Experiments Day" at the Science Museum of Minnesota in St Paul. The event is free with discounted museum admission. The event is co-hosted with General Dynamics. Some 600 engineers will volunteer and run hands-on exhibits for guests at the Carnegie Science Center in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Carnegie expects 5,000-6,000 guests February 17 and 18. Several students from the University of South Carolina will visit a local Columbia high school to talk about why they chose engineering and to do an activity with the students. Local high schools are also being invited to an open house held during Engineers Week. Contact is byrdcd3@engr.sc.edu. Girl Scout Engineering Saturday (GSES) at the University of Maryland, College Park, is a program for local Girl Scout troops in Maryland and the surrounding area. Cadettes and Seniors (grades 7-12) engage in fun hands-on activities and work towards earning the Inventions and Inquiry Project patches. GSES exposes Girl Scouts to engineering related activities, introduces young women to professional career options in engineering or science and helps university students develop and implement engineering related activities and enhance their communication and leadership skills. Contacts are jsmist@umd.edu and http://www.eng.umd.edu/wie. The 8th annual Girl Scouts Badge Day at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden is a collaboration between the local Mile Hi Girl Scouts Council and the Society of Women Engineers chapter. At this fun and engaging annual event, 200 Junior Girl Scouts are introduced to the Engineering Everything badge created for this event. There are individual patches for Phantastic Physics, Chem-Mystery,Women in the Military and Computer Fun. As a result of participating in this event, girls have enrolled at the School of Mines or have chosen engineering as their major, as well as the majority becoming enthused about science, technology, engineering and math topics as future careers while being introduced to campus life. Thanks to the 45 women (and some men) SWE students, the 200 girls and their 60 adults begin to see engineering everywhere! Handouts are distributed with information about National Engineers Week. Information contacts are lindaf@gsmhc.org and www.girlscoutsmilehi.org. For a third year the Society of Women Engineers at The University of Florida in Gainesville will be bringing 80 middle school girls from Alachua County to shadow 50 female engineering students. The activities will include visiting engineering labs, attending engineering classes, a question and answer session as well as hands-on activities to stimulate their interest in engineering. This will be the third year that the chapter hosts this event. See sweuf@grove.ufl.edu or http://grove.ufl.edu/~sweuf isisHawaii is a Hawaii-based non-profit organization that provides online mentoring resources for women and girls pursuing STEM interests. The group is partnering with the student chapter of the University of Hawaii at Manoa's Society of Women Engineers for an "Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day" event. Middle and high school girls interested in exploring engineering will participate in activities including a fun, hands-on game, interactive Webcast forum presenting a panel of local women engineers, and a workshop for the IEEE Bruce Angwin Memorial Scholarship applicants. Contact info@isishawaii.org and see http://www.isishawaii.org. ----------------------------------------- To submit content or comments, or to be added to our email distribution list, please e-mail eweek@nspe.org. All suggestions will be considered. Founded in 1951 by the National Society of Professional Engineers, Engineers Week ( February 19-25, 2006) is celebrated annually by thousands of engineers, engineering students, teachers, and leaders in government and business. In 1988, the National Engineers Week consortium expanded its scope and now includes more than 100 engineering, scientific, and education societies and major corporations dedicated to enhancing the public understanding of the engineering profession and to promoting pre-college interest in math, science, and engineering as a career option. |
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National Engineers Week Foundation
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