In celebration of National Engineers Week (E-Week), Saints Colman-John Neumann students in grades five through eight recently learned about careers in engineering and were guided by a Boeing engineer in building their own unmanned glider.
On Feb. 16, a Boeing structural engineer, Matthew Palmer, visited SCJN as part of Boeing’s annual E-Week program. Students received a 120-minute presentation that included a hands-on, problem-based learning experience. Students learned about lift, drag, thrust, and weight while constructing their gliders. Using things like paper, straws, paper clips, tape and pennies for cargo students were given the task to design, build and test a glider.
One of the challenges the kids were facing was distributing the weight of the cargo or pennies and making their glider fly farther than the other teams.