eGFI - For Teachers » Special Features

Feature: Pooling Their Talents

ASEE — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 12:00:05 +0000

A simulated shipwreck tested students from four Boston-area schools, who, through the MIT Sea Grant/Sea Perch Program, built remotely operated underwater vehicles to check for leaks of hazardous cargo and salvage the wreck.

Aerospace Inspires Winning Yacht Design

ASEE — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 09:00:35 +0000

The United States won the 33rd America’s Cup with a design that got a boost from aeronautical engineering. The wing sail of BMW Oracle Racing’s BOR 90 is essentially an oversized airplane wing. At 190 feet tall, it’s the largest sail ever used on a boat.

Feature: STEM Clubs Build Popularity

ASEE — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 12:00:27 +0000

STEM clubs are sprouting up in schools across the nation, cultivating curiosity about STEM subjects and building a pipeline of much needed future professionals. These clubs appeal to a wide array of students and are a great way to develop teamwork, leadership, and other life skills.

Feature: Where an Interest in Snakes Can Lead

jxs — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 10:00:34 +0000

There aren't too many high schoolers who carry out a chemistry experiment that might save lives. Samantha Piszkiewicz and Nicolai Doreng-Stearns, however, did just that. Leading a five-student team at Laguna Beach High School in California, they developed a synthetic antivenom for the treatment of poisonous snakebites.

Feature: Journey Into Science

ASEE — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 10:00:22 +0000

Want to offer your students a hands-on science experience, but lack access to a well-equipped lab? Try a field trip to a science center. Across the country, science centers and museums are working to provide the kind of interactive experiences that enliven classroom learning.

Feature: Warrior Against Poverty

ASEE — Mon, 24 May 2010 12:00:17 +0000

From helping impoverished trash workers in Argentina to transforming the way Canadian engineering students learn, Caroline Baillie has been a tireless champion of fostering social justice through engineering, challenging her colleagues and students to make ethics a core concern in their work.

Feature: Amy Smith, The Barefoot Engineer

ASEE — Sun, 23 May 2010 12:00:49 +0000

Amy Smith teaches mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is the driving force behind the Development Design Summit, which in 2009 hosted hosted more than 70 innovators, from Zambian health care workers to Caltech engineering students, for five weeks in Ghana. Her work encompasses 100 scattered projects in the pursuit of a single goal: using simple technology to lessen the burden of the rural poor. “I believe that there is a need for us to focus on solving the world’s most difficult problems,” she argues – problems that affect “the billions of people who don’t have safe water, sanitation, and enough food to eat.”

Feature: Teaming With Ideas

ASEE — Sun, 23 May 2010 10:00:23 +0000

College student contestants in the UNESCO-Daimler Mondialogo competition strive to design functional, environmentally friendly solutions to pressing problems in some of the world’s poorest regions. The contest pairs teams of college students from prosperous nations, such as the United States, with students from the developing world. They work on projects -- from better sewage disposal in an urban slum to bringing modern diagnostic techniques to rural clinics -- keyed to the United Nations' Millenium Development Goals. A story from Prism magazine, April 2009.

Glass-Making Opens a Window to Science

ASEE — Mon, 17 May 2010 10:00:36 +0000

Annie Nash's classes may be labeled “visual arts,” but they're much more. While mastering the use of cold, warm, and hot glass-working tools, her second to fifth grade students also learn chemistry, physics, the laws and sources of energy, optics, history, and the scientific method.

Feature: Preparing for Rising Sea Levels

ASEE — Mon, 10 May 2010 12:00:22 +0000

If all burning of fossil fuels were to cease tomorrow, the build-up of greenhouse gases in the Earth’s atmosphere is still severe enough that in 2100, we are still looking at a world at least several degrees warmer than during the pre-industrial era. That warming brings with it certain hazards – droughts, the spread of infectious diseases, the extinction of species. One hazard in particular will require an engineering response: the rise of sea levels.