DCE students develop engineering skills

D.C. Everest Senior High School students enrolled in the Engineering Design course are working on four distinct projects that challenge them to develop and use their design, engineering, problem-solving and teamwork skills. The projects are model rocketry, a remote-control boat, Vex Robotics and construction of a Rube Goldberg device.

The model rocketry group is participating in the Team America Rocketry Challenge competition. The team must custom-design and create a rocket that contains two eggs — one must be placed within the rocket horizontally; the other must be placed vertically. The rocket must launch as close to 500 feet as possible and be recovered with both eggs intact. The students must launch and recover the rocket three times within a specified time frame.

“In addition to the problem solving, learning to work as a team is a big outcome,” team member Christopher Kintop said.

The group working on the remote control boat project must follow the constraints of the Indianapolis Admirals Boat Club. Admirals Boat Club members build and operate scale merchant ships, pleasure craft, work boats, military ships, sailboats and submarines. Students are custom-designing a scale model using 3-D software.

“The nice thing about 3-D modeling and printing is that you don’t have to buy expensive parts when you can model them on the computer and print them,” senior Alex Redlin said. “Sometimes we can’t find the parts we need to purchase, so we print them.”

The robotics team members are preparing for a game-based engineering challenge, the Vex Robotics: Nothing but Net competition presented by the Robotics Education and Competition Foundation. The student team must design and build a robot that can throw more balls into low and high goals than the competition.

The Rube Goldberg team must create a Rube Goldberg machine that can open an umbrella. Rube Goldberg machines feature a complex series of operations designed to complete a simple task.

“The challenge is for students to design and incorporate numerous steps, simple machines and contraptions to make completing a simple task seem difficult,” said Aaron Hoffman, DCE career and technical education coordinator. “The open laboratory concept used in the classroom challenges students to use their design and engineering skills in a collaborative manner to solve a problem. They discover that people skills are just as critical as technical skills.”