Engineering Week #1 2025

This week we worked through all the disciplines of engineering starting with mechanical engineering on Monday. Campers got to design and build their own catapults from popsicle sticks, a plastic cup, and hot glue. There were a few trebuchets and well as the classic catapults. Campers loaded their catapults with cotton balls to see how far they could launch them. We also made cars powered by mouse traps. These were a bit more difficult since friction was working against us. The campers all had very different cars as some used bottle caps as wheels while others used CDs.

Tuesday we looked into the world of industrial and biomedical engineering. For industrial engineering, we played an optimization game where students had to find the best spots to place their burrito trucks to feed the most people and make the most money. For biomedical engineering, we created our own coatings to keep "pills" (skittles) safe from "stomach acid" (club soda). Campers got to create their coatings out of cornstarch, flour, sugar, vegetable oil, and water to try to keep the color from coming off the skittle for 10 minutes. Many campers discovered the fun of oobleck and we got to talk about non-Newtonian fluids. The best mixture we saw was a skittle covered in oobleck rolled in flour and then repeated to create multiple layers. We also created robo hands were the campers traced their hands, cut them out, and then added string tendons to simulate a prosthetic hand. Many robo hand high fives were given at the end of the day!

Computer science and electrical engineering was next on Wednesday. Campers worked in groups of two to create simple circuits on an Arduino board. Some groups added multiple LEDs and buttons to their boards making it more complicated and fun. After snack, we switched to programming LEGO robots to navigate a maze. It took a minute to figure out how to use the programming blocks and how to keep the robots from falling of the table. A few close calls happened, but no robots were harmed during camp.

Thursday was full of activities for biological and chemical engineering. Starting off with fingerprint analysis, campers inked their fingers and took prints to see what type of fingerprints they had. We talked about how individualize our fingerprints are and just as individualized as our fingerprints, so is DNA which lead to our next activity of DNA extraction from a strawberry. After smashing our strawberries and filtering the mixture we made through a paper towel, we were able to see strawberry DNA. Many campers said that it looked kinds like pink bubblegum. Next, we had campers draw anything they wanted in their engineering notebooks with a highlighter. Once they finished their drawings, we showed them how highlighters have fluorescent ink under UV light. Using this, campers created fluorescent jars using water and highlighter ink. The big event for Thursday was the elephant toothpaste experiment. Each camper got to create their own elephant toothpaste fountain and then we played in the foam at the end.

Wrapping up camp, we ended on civil engineering. Campers created popsicle stick bridges (with a little bit of cardboard) that had to span 10 inches. We also challenged campers to see how much weight their bridges could support. We were scrambling to find heavier objects because campers were absolutely rocking this challenge. Many bridges supported everything that we could find! Our final activity was to create the tallest tower with 30 sticks of dried spaghetti, 15 marshmallows, and 18 inches of tape. Using the strongest shape from the bridge building activity, many campers used triangles in their design to strengthen and support their towers.

P.S. We built really cool towers, bridges, and cantilevers during drop off and pick up! Here a few bonus pictures of those and a slow-mo video of a really cool bridge being karate chopped!

Thank you to Little Debbie for sponsoring our event and providing snacks for our campers! Thank you to FTC Team 7209 Tech Hog Robotics and FTC Team 8373 Diva Force for volunteering and working with our campers!