Learn for Free

Geometry student's graphic repeat cell

This is an exciting time for education. Digital media and connectivity make it more possible than ever to learn what you want, when you want, applying it as creatively as possible. Here's a list of free resources that I've come across that can help both students and, well, I was going to say out-of-schoolers - but we really all should be continually learning at this point.

majortests.com
Free SAT, GRE and GMAT standardized test plans and problems. Has a nifty feature that can print you out an eight week study plan. Totally costless, has a thousand vocab words.

Classes from MIT
I spent one summer in high school studying at MIT and fell in love with it. Even though I went to University of Virginia, it's been in my heart ever since. MIT now offers many of its classes online FREE, calling it Open Courseware. Chemistry, economics, urban planning, engineering, it's all there. Some courses have notes only, a few have multimedia.

Classes from Everywhere
Organized by language, this site lists universities that offer Open Courseware similar to MIT's program. Notre Dame, Michigan, even Oxford's Mathematical Institute let you learn, self-paced, without cost.

Teach Engineering
Standards-based engineering lessons and activities, searchable and sortable by age and discipline. Great for encouraging students to think and collaborate, with lists of materials needed and how long activities should take.

Alcumus
The Art of Problem Solving's free, challenging and slightly addictive math tutorial. What I like about this site is that you sign up and are given a math problem to solve. If you get it right, the program bumps you up to harder problems. Get it wrong, and you'll work through more problems until you understand the basics. You score points and can compete, see your rankings, and if a whole class does it the teacher can view class stats. Many math disciplines treat subjects like silos, going deep into algebra or geometry but never mixing the two. An engineer might have an issue that requires algebra, geometry, logic and be open-ended; Alcumus comes up with problems that (in my opinion) more closely simulate the real world.

Engineering.com
I've spent my share of time playing pointless but fun online games. This link gets you to more point-full games that integrate physics concepts, mechanical knowledge, and oh, by the way, are just as easy to fritter away time on. The only difference is that you'll be sharpening your mind.

Amazing lectures from TED
I've so enjoyed learning obscure, wonderful things from TED, a nonprofit that has as its goal sharing ideas. They invite speakers who are inspiring, strange and informative. In the last few days I've watched the world-champion whistler, learned about bioluminescence and saw a mathemagician.

That's probably enough for now. I've got tons more, if anyone wants particular help finding math vs. engineering vs. something else, let me know!

Designing Packaging

Test your packaging acumen - out of these solid shapes, given a volume of 12 ounces, which would use the least packaging?
Yesterday I gave the class a taste of packaging engineering. It made sense since we just finished a materials science unit with a focus on properties - the kind of stuff that wraps and protects the things we buy and use is vital!

Packaging engineers must be able to successfully integrate industrial or chemical engineering and work with a team of marketers, designers and financial types. Choosing the proper material, labeling it with the right colors, transporting it safely, while protecting the food or consumer goods inside is a complex task.

Take fast-food soda cups for instance. I'm a forgetful type, so when I've got that large drink of lemonade in my cupholder I'll often leave it there for, um, let's say a few days. The same cup that nicely brought lovely cold lemonade to my lips has, after 72 hours or so, begun leaking out of the bottom seam and depositing unlovely sticky lemon syrup in my cupholder. Why didn't the quick serve eatery make a better takeaway cup? Why not plastic instead of waxy paper?

Every paper packaging decision involves a trade-off. Fast-food joints could easily provide solid plastic take-out cups but the cost for plastic instead of waxy paper would be much higher. They could also design the cups with better paper to hold the liquid longer but that would take more money as well. The fact is, engineers and marketing teams have decided that for the given design goals of serving a beverage that (should be) finished and disposed of in a few hours a slightly waxy paper cup is just the right container. In some sense the fast-food cup is "designed to fail" at just the right time to save everyone money and reduce waste.

How about a half-gallon of orange juice? Now there's a product that won't usually be finished in a few hours, barring an attack of thirsty teenage boys. (Once I drank a quart of milk in one sitting but that was kind of gross.) The paper is thicker, more waxy, with a replaceable cap. It won't leak in a few days - but it won't last forever, either. It also has very cleverly designed features and colors to make you enjoy drinking it and think that it's fresh, usually pictures of trees and oranges and straws on the outside. You could have a great sturdy container of OJ but with drawings of candy on the outside and it wouldn't sell because moms would think it was full of sugar, even if it wasn't.

Now, which shape did you guess would use the least packaging? It's the sphere.

Students this last week listened to a lecture on surface area and volume, void space and efficient shapes. Even though the sphere has the best surface area to volume ratio (the least packaging to hold the most volume) we don't see spheres of juice on the shelves! Why? Not an engineering constraint, but a consumer use one - people don't want their soda to roll away! Also, spheres take up more room when stacked in a box than rectangular prisms do.

After the lecture, students worked in teams of about five with pieces of paper to design a paper cup that could hold the most volume of water for about a minute. With only one piece of paper at a time, the surface area was set but the volume could vary - and did! Designs that were rounded in shape seemed to work best, although plain paper without any coating would leak water within a matter of minutes. Still, if someone could engineering a paper cup that could be made by folding only, no glue or cutting needed, while still serving consumer needs, there would be much less waste and tons of money saved on manufacturing.

For more study check out these sites showcasing excellent design in packaging:

The Dieline

I.D. Magazine Annual Design Review

Sugru Designs by Students

We've just finished two classes' worth of sugru solutions. I am so proud of my students, most of whom are around 15 years old, for creatively practicing the design cycle and giving excellent presentations. Several of them have been so kind as to allow me to post pictures of their work. There were modifications, repairs, even suggested inventions.



Overall, I think using an actual substance to help students understand materials science, polymers, and design was a good way for them to own the knowledge.

Woohoo! The Sugru is here!

It arrived just in time to hand out to eager students.

On Failure

I had someone this week ask me what to do if his or her engineering project "failed". Would he or she still have to present to the class?

I've never been good with failure. Something about coming from a driven family, my mother being a second generation immigrant and my father being the youngest of five where his dad was a longshoreman. We scrapped and scraped in many ways because we had to.

I even remember a time in my life when it felt like failure was an impossibility, when everything I did seemed to turn to gold. Why think about failing when it was not a reality?


The truth of it is, during that golden period I was the most despondent I've ever been. Accomplishment, academic and athletic success, and I was still hunted inside. I remember feeling embittered that honors could not make me happy inside or bring together my broken family.

Now, married thirteen years with four kids, I've had plenty of opportunities to fail. Plan a notable family activity, surely one for the scrapbooks, and end up mad with frustration instead. Promise myself I won't say that extra mean thing on the tip of my tongue. Too late. Love someone so hard that they'll stay on the straight and narrow. Nope.

It all extends to this class in a way. I feel like my growth as a person shows up in what I say and affects my students. I've had a lot of lumps and honestly get uncommonly excited about failure. It's that failure is instructive and presses the experience deep into our minds. My acceptance of "messing up" allows me more grace with others.

Failure or not, everyone will present. It's better that way, more honest and revealing, and those who have their project go awry will probably getting something juicier from the experience than those who got it on the first try.

Just getting past the dead of winter and we're beginning an awesome new project. So last fall as I ran around the internet bookmarking resources I came across Sugru by way of a contest on instructables.com. I stopped moving for two hours while reading about this new synthetic polymer designed by an Irishwoman named Jane. Right out of the pack, before it sets or "cures", Sugru is moldable and plastic-y like play-doh. After 30 minutes it begins to cure and after 24 hours it is a flexible, heat- and cold-resistant, form-keeping waterproof silicone substance. Sugru can adhere things if pressed together before curing, making it handy for repairing or modifying anything, really. Seeing as how my main objectives for Intro to Engineering include thinking/learning like an engineer AND practicing the design cycle I was hooked on the thought of getting some Sugru, teaching a unit on materials science engineering around it, and letting them engineer their own solutions (the folks overseas call these fix-its "hacks").

Here's how it's gone so far:

In early January I introduced the topic of materials science with some goofy commentary on how you wouldn't want a concrete sweater or a bridge made out of marshmallows. How materials react under stress and temperature is a key concern for an engineer. We covered stress, strain and their correct units and looked at how a stress vs. strain graph might give us helpful data. After an overview of elastic, plastic and brittle characteristics, the students used cans of various weights to squash marshmallows, clay and lego towers. They measured the amount of deformation, calculated and plotted points for their stress-strain curves, and made estimates as to which material belonged in which category.
(Marshmallows were a tricky substance since I had mini ones and needed to smash them together to make a marsh-ball. I didn't use any water to goo it because that would have changed the elastic properties.)

The following week we covered what polymers are and named common polymers such as rubber, PVC, stryofoam, teflon and silicone. Thanks to the Polymer Science Learning Center for many helpful resources and links for students to explore. I also introduced Sugru and briefly discussed it's properties when uncured and cured.

Rewind here: after falling in love with Sugru, I sent Jane an email with possibly the worst sales pitch of all time. "Send us some Sugru for our class or I will be forced to buy some!" I did buy some and played with it around the house, fixing and patching things, and Jane graciously agreed to send us some for this unit.

Students have brainstormed with classmates, peppered me with insightful and silly questions (Does it float? How old is Jane?) and are currently drawing a diagram of their proposed solution. This week I hand out the Sugru to students. After a week of making their hack and documenting the results each will present to the class.

I can't wait to see what they decide to do with it. I'm contemplating such hacks as safety-proofing a cabinet, modifying a game controller or attaching a lamp directly to a bedframe.

More posts to come.

So much for me blogging consistently all year!

I've now spent the last four months teaching thirty eager homeschoolers introductory principles of engineering. The students range in age with most landing on 14-15 years old. Why am I teaching homeschoolers? In Charlottesville, Virginia, there is a flourishing homeschool community that organizes itself nicely into co-operatives and smaller classes for specialized subjects that parents aren't as comfortable teaching on their own.

For five years I've been a Geometry and Physics instructor, pulling from my Engineering degree at the University of Virginia (thank you, professors). This course is really a work in progress since there's no way to cover all the amazing aspects of the field and this is the first year. I've got five units as guide:

1. Thinking and Learning Like an Engineer
2. Communicating and Collaborating Like an Engineer
3. Knowing STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) and the Design Cycle Like an Engineer
4. Ethical Dilemmas of Engineering
5. Engineering Careers

My husband Dave, who has a master's in teaching, helped me to create a class format that would achieve learning objectives in a fun and interactive way. I provide a brief lecture on a unit topic, followed by an activity illustrating the topic, ending with a class debrief. Students have as their primary aid a bound notebook for reflective journaling. Each week they record diagrams and drawings from class, thoughts, likes/dislikes, suggestions, and things that surprised them from the activity.

Students also complete a second journal entry on an internet resource that I provide that complements the topic.

As an example - for one of our first classes, I combined a STEM concept with a Collaboration concept for Cantilevered Bridges. The lecture time covered center-of-mass, cantilevers, common cantilevers in society and how a successful cantilever can be designed. For the activity, teams of 3-4 students had about thirty toothpicks and gobs of molding clay. The design goal was to make the longest possible cantilever in a set time. Once time was over, students compared their structures with other groups', then had another round to revise and improve. Finally, we recorded lengths and sketches and discussed what worked and what didn't.

A typical student journal from that class might comment on what he or she knew already vs. what was new, what was unexpected, what it was like to work with others, and what successful cantilever design might entail.

The resource link I sent to students as an application was an article about the Quebec Bridge Collapse over the St. Lawrence River. The Quebec Bridge in 1907 was the most ambitious cantilevered bridge project to date, and it failed catastrophically. Students read the link and make connections between the real-life bridge, our activity, group work, and ethics.

We've now had 15 classes in a similar format, with a focal point, interactive project, and then verbal and written reflection.

There are so many other tie-ins that I'd like to include - visits to engineering firms around town, connections to colleges, helping students get internships - I can't do it all, but I want to!