{"id":42811,"date":"2016-03-22T13:11:31","date_gmt":"2016-03-22T18:11:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kjhk.org\/web\/?p=42811"},"modified":"2016-03-22T13:11:31","modified_gmt":"2016-03-22T18:11:31","slug":"2016-engineering-expo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kjhk.org\/web\/2016\/03\/22\/2016-engineering-expo\/","title":{"rendered":"2016 Engineering Expo"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"IMG_4958\"From\u00a0February 25-27<\/span>, Engineering Student Council held KU Engineering Expo, an annual student-led event since 1911, at the KU School of Engineering. The event attracted community members, college students and K-12 students.<\/p>\n

James A, an elementary school student came to the expo with an engineering project, a rattrap car.<\/p>\n

\u201cI watched a few videos on mouse traps online, and then we physically evolved that to a rat trap and added some of my own stuff, like fleece on the one arm to make sure it didn\u2019t snap or hurt if it did snap.<\/span>\u201d James said.<\/span><\/p>\n

James said he did a lot of engineering related activities and he is glad that he came to the expo.<\/p>\n

\u201cI am building a paper box,\u201d James said, \u201cso it could flow to see how many rocks it could fit in it. We went to see tesla coil, Pasta Bridge, slingshot and robotic shocker.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"IMG_4890\"Crystal Pyle, a parent, said she heard about the expo from her son Anthony Pyle\u2019s gifted program teacher and came from Ottawa, Kansas to KU to participate in the expo.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe seems really excited about wanting to try new things,\u201d Pyle said, \u201c I think that is very exciting, and it is a good learning experience for him. He is definitely wanting to come back next year.\u201d<\/p>\n

Pyle also said that her son was involved in the Pasta Bridge competition to see how well the bridge can support the basket of sand. Other than competitions like Pasta Bridge, there were also exhibits. Dylan Unrein, a senior majoring in mechanical engineering, elaborated the scientific side of the Super Mario World.<\/p>\n

\"KU\u201cOur organization is Pi Tau Sigma, the Mechanical Engineering Honor Society, which I am the president of,\u201d Unrein said, \u201cSo the overlying theme of the expo is \u2018Engineering around the world\u2019, and we decided that instead of doing a country, why not switch things up and do Super Mario World, and that\u2019s our theme. We are trying to teach kids younger than college-age kids basic engineering concepts, such as torque or project on motion through small fun demonstration of Popsicle catapults.\u201d<\/p>\n

Genevive Stell, a middle school student participating in the Super Mario World, told us that she wants to be an animator, and she thinks activities like this will help her understand engineering concepts to help her reach her passion.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are trying to make a catapult out of straws,\u201d Genevive said. \u201cMy mom is a sculptor, so she sometimes is like, \u2018Okay, see, you have to weight times this to make sure that it fits into a certain space\u201d, and I am really interested in this\u2026this kind of thing will help me\u2026I am really excited to see what else they have and what else I can do.\u201d<\/p>\n

Genevive said she is also involved in a Lego League team, and she is the only girl in it. While Genevive plays catapults with her Lego League teammates, Unrein said that the expo helps eliminate stereotypes people put on engineering.<\/p>\n

\"KU\u201cI think it is beneficial because it shows that engineering can beat out some stereotypes where it is not just math whizzes or science whizzes,\u201d Unrein said, \u201cit can be fun for anybody, and that anybody can be an engineer if they just have fun and work hard with it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Unrein also said that this is his second time helping with the expo and he thinks the expo is opening up the engineering world to the kids and the community in general.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think it is a great experience trying to expose kids to the world of STEM, science, technology, engineering and math, and doing in a fun manner,\u201d Unrein said, \u201cKids do not have the greatest attention span, so trying to do it in a fun manner is where they\u2019re learning without necessarily knowing that their learning is a good experience.\u201d<\/p>\n

Besides student organizations and clubs, some engineering classes also participated in the expo. Dhaval Mysore, one of the GTA Instructors for a mechanical engineering, said the instructors worked with them to design the projects and helped students to make the projects fun so that they are friendly to all age groups.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey implement the programming skills that they learn as well as some basic stuff like sensor, data acquisition to the projects. At the same time, students will collect the data and know how to post process it and then come up with a conclusion based on whatever their project is.”<\/p>\n

Mysore said he is happy to see both students and visitors enjoy themselves by engaging in engineering projects and experiments.<\/p>\n

\u201cI also see an enthusiasm in them.\u201d Mysore said. \u201cIt is like a real interaction with students as supposed to just a regular assignment they do at home.\u201d and they also know it\u2019s more like real-life hard deadline.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"KUEngineering Expo started on Thursday with a speaker talking about engineering world at the Lied Center. On Thursday and Friday, the expo mainly targeted K-12 students and community members to visit different classrooms where student groups put on displays and demonstrations. Students were also able to participate in simple hands-on competitions and earn an award when the awards were presented to the winners at the award ceremony at the end of the days. Then eventually on Saturday, the expo opened up to all community members and KU students.<\/p>\n

Dylan Watcher, one of the Expo Chairs on Engineering Student Council as well as a junior studying aerospace engineering said they put a lot of preparation into the three-day event. He said the three Expo Chairs split up their responsibilities. He said they were trying to reach different student groups to lead the expo with competition design and project design, and they are all student-driven.<\/p>\n

\u201cBasically we just reached out to all the groups in the School of Engineering and any other groups that would be interested,\u201d Watcher said, \u201cWe just see if they want to participate and what kind of competitions they want to run\u2026 They want to help see the next generation of engineers and sciences. We want to help that process along.\u201d<\/p>\n

Watcher also said they reach out to different school and communities to encourage them to participate in the expo.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo we have accumulated a list of different schools, different teachers, different parents that have been interested in the past and wanting to possibly participate,\u201d Watcher said, \u201cbasically we just reached out too them via email, via phone. We have a group of boy scouts and girl scouts we were also talking to so that\u2019s something we\u2019ve been working on this year is getting that public day filled.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"KUWatcher said he personally think they had a great turnout and he said in the future, they would keep on trying to reach more people.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was crazy yesterday; it was crazy today, and we love that kind of crazy, because it gets kids excited about engineering,\u201d Watcher said. \u201cI really love expo. I think it\u2019s for a great cause\u2026I\u2019ve talked to one of our advisors from the career center, and she told me that her child and her friends had been talking about it weeks afterwards, so something like that just really makes some reasons to do all of this.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From\u00a0February 25-27, Engineering Student Council held KU Engineering Expo, an annual student-led event since 1911, at the KU School of Engineering. The event attracted community members, college students and K-12 students. James A, an elementary school student came to the expo with an engineering project, a rattrap car. \u201cI watched a few videos on mouse traps online, and then we physically evolved that to a rat trap and added some of my own stuff, like fleece on the one arm […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8092,"featured_media":43666,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,3225,15],"tags":[4697,4571,4696],"class_list":["post-42811","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-culture","category-culture-events","category-featured-on-kjhk","tag-engineering","tag-engineering-expo","tag-ku-engineering"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/kjhk.org\/web\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/IMG_4907.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kjhk.org\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42811","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kjhk.org\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kjhk.org\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kjhk.org\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8092"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kjhk.org\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42811"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/kjhk.org\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42811\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kjhk.org\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/43666"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kjhk.org\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42811"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kjhk.org\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42811"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kjhk.org\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42811"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}