Orange County Branch Newsletter

February 2016

K-12 Outreach

South Junior High

By Steven Taylor

On Friday, January 15, Steven Taylor, Amy Choi, and Gyssela Quinabo introduced civil engineering to Ms. Linh Ho’s 8^th grade science classes at South Junior High, in Anaheim. They talked about what a civil engineer does, what the requirements are to become a civil engineer, and the many opportunities within civil engineering. To get the students interested and excited about what a civil engineer does the students participated in fun art/engineering activity. The activity was to build an art mobile while learning about equilibrium of forces. Working in pairs the students had to find a way to balance picture cut outs on wooden skewers. The theme of the activity was to show that civil engineering is about thinking outside the box and understanding that engineering design is becoming more and more complicated. At the end of each class period many groups had completed the activity and came up with interesting designs on how to balance the different weights associated with their cut outs. Ms. Linh Ho was very impressed at the level the students understood equilibrium of forces, and she said the presentation was a good gateway to their next lesson of physics.