Engineer Hallee Deutchman: So honestly, the change from mechanical engineering, the broader world view to materials, like this smaller, literally, atomic world view–

Johnny Devine: The project that I’m working with my AP physics class, currently is guided by a need to know question for the students of, “How can we successfully put a lander on the surface of Mars?” During the final task, task five, where students did there drop and qualification tests, we had a number of engineers from Blue Origin and Boeing present and communicating with the students, asking a number of great questions.

Engineer Marina Hernandez: Okay, what do the other designs look like?

Student: This and this.

Engineer Marina Hernandez: Interesting. Yeah, how did this one hold up?

Johnny Devine: There’s motivation for the students when the project they have connects to an actual real world problem and that they see or hear actual people that have a job that uses those skills. I try to make sure that they’ve got that connection. That they see, here’s a person. We’re gonna hear from them. They’re applying the concepts that you’re learning right now to tackle these real world problems.

Engineer Adam Wuerl: I basically knew I wanted to be in the aerospace field since I was around your age in high school. It was basically when I learned that you can get a job building spaceships. And I was like, “That’s it, that’s what I wanna do.”

Johnny Devine: Give the students a chance to really see if the language they were using and the concepts that they were trying to explain actually made sense to somebody besides me or a peer in the classroom.

Elizabeth: Equation, impulse equals force times time.

Engineer Dan Wade: Right.

Elizabeth: So if we change, either force or time, the other one’s gonna react if impulse is constant.

Engineer Dan Wade: That’s very insightful. That’s good.

Elizabeth: It helped that they were using some of the same vocabulary we were. It was kind of a connection of, this is actually a thing that goes on.

Engineer Dan Wade: Things can normalize your motion that you may have underneath. Underneath that chute can mellow out some before impact.

Elizabeth: If you manipulate time, the force also changes. And so that’s how we’ve been changing the force.

Johnny Devine: There is a lot of great communication going on, both directions.

Student: Hit and then crack all the eggs.

Engineer Marina Hernandez: And then directly, okay cool. And it sounds like you’ve done a little bit of testing to see if that works.

Student: Yeah, we’ve done a fair amount.

Johnny Devine: The students are able to understand what the engineers were saying back to them and the engineers also, seemed to be quite impressed by the ability of the students to explain their choices in the design of their landers using appropriate physics language.

Elizabeth: We were really just focused on the maximum air resistance.

Engineer Marina Hernandez: Yeah, that makes sense.

Elizabeth: That we could get.

Johnny Devine: We often struggle with the fact that we’re trying to teach students knowledge for jobs that don’t exist yet and that’s how quickly things are changing, especially in the STEM field.

Engineer Dan Wade: As a mechanic, I learned a lot too. So when I into engineering, I was able to view things through a different lens. I knew how a machine worked. I knew how to program.

Johnny Devine: To have these engineers come in and say, “This is what we do on a daily basis. “These are the skills I wish I had developed more “when I was your age.” has a really meaningful impact. Can we give a huge round of applause to all of our experts and guests for coming in today?

Science and Math Institute