Engineering Thrills
Posted on May 15th, 2018 by Mary Lord
A lot of engineering goes into making today’s gravity-defying rides both exciting and safe. Read about some roller coaster designers and the skills they bring to creating the world’s most thrilling wooden, steel, and virtual-reality experiences.
Filed under: K-12 Education News, Special Features | Comments Off on Engineering Thrills
Tags: Design, Energy, Engineering, engineering careers, Feature Story, forces, Physics, roller coaster engineering, Videos
In this activity, small groups of students in grades 3 to 8 learn about forces, energy, and efficiency by measuring a bicycle’s gear ratios, calculating tire revolutions, and testing who can ride a course the swiftest based on that information.
Their human-powered helicopter hovered into the history books and won the American Helicopter Society’s $1 million Sikorsky prize. Now, a team of University of Toronto engineering students and graduates has pedaled the world’s fastest human-powered bicycle into the record books at almost 90 mph.
From dockless bike sharing and airless tires to Eta, the world’s fastest pedal bike (photo), bicycle technology has come a long way since the 1858 velocipede Boneshaker debuted. And engineering students and researchers have powered many of the innovations. 
OK Go is a wildly popular band that “likes to make stuff.” AnnMarie Thomas, a University of St. Thomas engineering educator and amateur circus aerialist, likes to make stuff, too. Put them together and the result is OK Go Sandbox, a free, video-rich repository of design challenges, curricula, and other resources that put the *fun* in fundamental STEM concepts while fostering creativity. 
Children’s literature is full of memorable wildlife adventure stories, but Deborah Lee Rose and Jane Veltkamp’s Beauty and the Beak may be the first to feature engineers and their role in outfitting an injured eagle with a 3-D printed prosthetic beak. A free education guide with standards-based STEM, STEAM, and literacy lessons accompanies the book, winner of the 2018 AAAS/Subaru SB&F Prize for Excellence in Science Books.
What do computer pioneer Ada Lovelace, Hitler’s atomic bomb effort, and the Slinky have in common? All are among the National Science Teachers Association’s inaugural list of 31 Best STEM Books for 2017.
Engineering graduate students and new faculty are invited to present at a first-of-its-kind Doctoral Engineering Research Showcase and federal agency/university job fair sponsored by the National GEM Consortium and the American Society for Engineering Education. Apply by Nov. 17 for the January 22-23, 2018 event in Washington, D.C.
Alice Zhai’s curiosity about Hurricane Sandy’s destructiveness led to an outstanding high school science fair project – and a collaboration with a NASA scientist that produced a journal paper outlining a new statistical model for better predicting the economic damage from big storms.
