Today, I participated in an engineering week event, that was sponsored by Intel. It’s intended to expose teenagers to engineering.  This gave me an excuse to visit a middle school and see it from inside. Having gotten all my education abroad, I actually have never been inside of a US school. I only “knew” it from TV. It’s quite different from our schools in Germany – lockers everywhere!

The class format allows the students to design a puff-mobile (a vehicle propelled by your breath) from a set of simple parts that are provided: sheet of paper, three straws, four ring sized cough drops (Life SaverTM), two paper clips and some tape.
The kids split up in teams of four to design and build their own vehicle. After 30min they compete against each other. They have to explain their design and then race it against the other team.
The ingenuity of the kids surprised me. Not one vehicle looked like the other. And the results of the race were even more unpredictable. We managed to get the crowd going and in the end the 25 students were standing around the race track table cheering each other on. We managed to talk about some engineering concepts as well and left the class after one and a half hours.
This was definitely fun and I will repeat this next year!