Engineering Week 2026

We took a deep dive into the disciplines of engineering this week to see just how wide the world of engineering really is! Starting off with a nice alliteration, we did mechanical engineering Monday! Campers started by designing and building their own catapults while working around their constraints of time and material limits. We also switched it up this year and made balloon powered cars! Campers used cardboard, straws, skewers, and various different materials for wheels to create the base of their cars. There was some initial issues with the balloons flying across the room without the cars, but with some more tape and rubber bands, we got the cars to also go flying!

Moving into Tuesday, we took a look into industrial engineering in the morning and biomedical engineering in the afternoon. For industrial engineering, we played a burrito game where campers had to find the best spot to place their burrito trucks to feed the most people while balancing the cost of running the food trucks. For biomedical engineering, we created "robo" hands by tracing our own hands, cutting them out, and adding tendons with string and straws to hold them in place. Some campers took their hands to the next level by adding tendons on the backside as well to open and close their hands and adding a way to attach it to their own human hands. We also looked into the pharmaceutical aspects of biomedical engineering by creating a pill coating to keep the skittle safe from the club soda which imitates a pill in a stomach. Campers could choose between flour, cornstarch, sugar, vegetable oil, and water to make their coating.

On Wednesday, we looked into electrical and computer science engineering. In the morning we used snap circuits to explore electrical engineering. While campers were creating their circuits, we showed them what some of the components they were using looks like on real everyday circuit boards like resistors, capacitors, and speakers. After snack, we switched to computer science engineering by programming LEGO® robots to navigate a maze. We even threw in a surprise of having to grab a block from a dead end and having to bring it out with the robot, but nothing could stop these campers!

Our messiest day was Thursday as we explored chemical and biological engineering. For biological engineering, we started bioluminescent jars made from water and a highlighter combined in a clear container. When put under a UV light, they really glow! Campers hands and anything else the highlighter might have touched glow too! Moving on from the glow jars, we extracted the DNA of a strawberry. Sadly, this year we weren't able to extract DNA from every group's strawberry, but we did get enough for everyone to see the strands floating in the rubbing alcohol before they clumped together. After snack, we wrapped up biological engineering by looking at something just as unique as our DNA, our fingerprints. Every campers inked and pressed their finger before determining what type of fingerprints they have. We only did one activity for chemical engineering, but it was an explosive one! Grouping up, we worked through the chemical reaction of elephant toothpaste. Each camper was able to create their own explosion and watch everyone's at their table.

We wrapped up the week by ending on civil engineering. Before snack, campers worked in teams of two to build a tower out of pasta and marshmallows to see who could build the tallest tower. There was a bit of a learning curve as campers had to figure out how to break the pasta noodles consistently and accurately, but our tallest tower was 26.5 inches tall. We also had a team make the strongest but the smallest tower. For the next activity, we gave them slightly stronger building material (paper) to see how much weight they could hold. Campers found that the best results came when they made short paper tubes and then stacked the

weights on top. After snack, we made popsicle stick bridges with a little bit of cardboard and hot glue. There were many bridges that we could not break because we ran out of weights!

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!