The New Semester Brings Forth Engineers!

As ACHS has changed to a "trimester" schedule, things have been very different as far as my class schedule goes! I only have RCHS students until December, but have ACHS students until February. The classes are about ten minutes shorter than the RCHS classes. Several students from the Beta ETCA class are taking courses at the Lake Cumberland Technology Center. I actually have 6 of my 9 engineering students riding over to Russell County every day to take CNC Machine Tool and CAD!! This is awesome because the students are telling their friends what an awesome learning experience this hands-on education is! I hope to continue to send more and more Adair students to LCTC! Talk about differentiation! It's wonderful!

Okay, some of the pictures I want to share with you on this post are of ACHS students working on the Ultimate Can Opener Project, where students reverse-engineered existing can openers and then designed their own based on the functions and features of their "competitors" products. The students learned how to identify primary and secondary functions as well as features of all kinds of different products.

The next big project involved sippy cups...of all things! Students evaluated the spill-proof valve mechanisms from several different cup manufacturers. They did this for two groups, 1) Infant to Toddler and 2) The Big Kid Cup. Throughout the "Reverse Engineering" FordPAS module, students pretend to be engineering interns at a company called Gadget King. They had to present their designs using sketches and Power Point presentations to the CEO of Gadget King (which happened to be me;) The following slideshow captures some of the best moments of this project!

Students have just finished Fall Break and are in the midst of learning about the importance of operator instructions and assembly instructions. During this project, students build anything they want using Legos! They have to take apart their product and another team must reconstruct their EXACT product using instructions created by the team. We are ready to trade this week! Teams will be graded on how well the other team can assemble the product with the instructions that were provided. Should be interesting! I have digital pictures to make sure all features, colors, and views are exactly the same...so no cheating!!

Hope you enjoy this post!

Mrs. Spoon