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Week 3: Aeronautical Engineering |
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Continuing with the Types of Engineering curriculum, this week's activity featured Aeronautical Engineering. We began with a quick recap of the previous lesson: Civil Engineering. I was pleased to see that many of the students remembered not only the bridge loading activity, but also other the other types of work that civil engineers do, like road and building design. We then moved on to Aeronautical Engineering. The concepts that were incorporated into the lesson included lift and gravity forces, surface area, and also velocity. The students had recently done a unit on fractions, so we went over numerator and denominator of velocity; distance and time. The activity involved building parachutes out of different types of materials and measuring the amount of time it took for each parachute to fall a set distance. The students were asked to compute the velocity for their parachute. We ended with a discussion on which parachutes worked the best and why.
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