TRY ENGINEERING

A few weeks ago, my high school had the amazing opportunity to participate in a workshop of "Try Engineering" from real life engineers of the UIB (Universitat de les Illes Balears). Their aim was to give us basic knowledge of engineering. 

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They first taught us what an engineer is, the work they do and what types of engineers exist: civil engineers, software engineers, mechanical engineers, chemical engineers... Then, with only 50 minutes, we had to build a wind turbine that should lift a bag of tea. We had to adapt to our own materials: cardboard, strings, celo tape and other simple materials. Almost all the groups achieved in doing this activity and we not only learned but also had fun creating it.

Now we know that an engineer is someone who designs and builds things to find solution to specific problems. All engineers must find the simplest solution that can solve the problem, using the materials they have in a certain period of time.

Our group, composed by Tomeu, Nikola, Adam, August, Sebastià and I, worked quite well. We gave each other a role to do so everyone could be part of the project. All the members worked and contributed to it so we could finish the wind turbine on time. 

However, we could improve some aspects of it. At first we didn't know that the wings had to move with wind coming directly to the front so we had to changed them.

Our arrangement didn't work perfectly well but it still lifted the tea bag. So next time we must fix better the wings.

The workshop wanted us to feel or know how an engineer work or how is to be an engineer so I think that we worked as engineers. We built a wind turbine to solve the problem we had (lifting a tea bag) using only the materials we needed and had. Maybe we could have found a simpler solution but we did our best and with 50 minutes we could only solve the problem in that way.

I think most of my classmates and I have felt like engineers because we had to find a solution to a problem with certain material and time. So we had the same pressure and conditions that an engineer has when designing and building something.

I enjoyed this activity and as I said it was a great oportunity for us to be able to do it. It was really interesting and amusing.