Wilderness Engineers
Posted on July 26th, 2018 by Mary Lord
Their work may be invisible when you visit America’s 758 wilderness areas, but engineers have played a key role in preserving and improving access to the country’s most pristine spots, including “road kill apps” and critter crossings to measure and reduce collisions between people and wildlife.
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Tags: campground, construction, engineers, Environmental Engineering, National Park Service, nature, roads, U.S. Forest Service, UC Davis Road Ecology Center, wilderness, wildlife
The National Park Service, steward of mountain ranges and monuments, offers STEM lessons, education programs, and other teacher resources. The aim: reach a quarter of America’s students through real and virtual field trips. State parks are serving up STEM, too!
To celebrate its 100th birthday and engage the next century’s environmentalists, the National Park Service is opening parks to 4th graders and their teachers and parents for free. Every Kid in a Park includes trip planning tools and teacher activity guides. No time or funds for field trips? Take a virtual tour of the Grand Canyon or explore resources for teaching history to citizen science.
The National Park Service just turned 100 and what better way to celebrate than with the grand opening of a stunning new addition to the National Mall. The $540 million National Museum of African American History and Culture is adorned with a corona, or scrim, of 3,600 bronze-colored cast-aluminum panels that glow at night from the light within, and was built around a 77-ton, 80-foot-long railway car and other huge artifacts housed in its vast below-ground exhibit space. 
Structural engineer Emma Cardini has inspected some pretty impressive facades, including the Chicago Tribune Tower’s ornate spires and the Bridge of the Americas in Panama. Still, nothing compares with the capital bird’s eye view she literally enjoys on her latest job: rappelling down the marble sides of the Washington Monument to assess the damage from late August’s 5.8-magnitude earthquake.
Students in grades 2 to 4 learn about wildlife habitats, environmental engineering, and the complexities of nest construction by attempting to design and build a nest themselves.
