What does an Engineer really do?

What does an Engineer really do? 

Congratulations! We have made it through our first full week of the 2016 - 2017 school year! This past week in all classes students have been learning what engineers do for a living.

8th Grade: 

Students started off the week with an engineering scavenger hunt to see how many types of engineers they could find. They then narrowed this list down to three types of engineers that they had an interest in and made a very simple poster with some more detailed information regarding the specific engineer. The next part of this small mini unit on engineering is my favorite. After looking at so many types of engineers I had the students pick one type that they really liked. They then had to find a college or university they could attend in the future to obtain a degree in their chosen field of study. I always enjoy bring project into the real world which is why I am having students write a letter to their chosen university requesting more general information about the school. I will mail these letters out later next week and we will see if anything gets sent back to the school. In the past I have students have received information back from many different schools. They have not printed their letters out yet. If you would like to read the letter they wrote ask your student about the assignment. The letter should be saved to their google docs which they can access from home.

8th grade students also had their interview with an engineer homework assessment due this Friday 8/19. There were a lot of really neat responses to the interview and I hope all of my students learned a thing or two about what an engineer really does by interviewing an real engineer.

7th Grade: 

Though not in as much detail the 7th grade course mirrored  8th grade quite a bit. Students researched types of engineers and created a brochure that explained in detail one particular engineering career field. We mainly used www.bls.gov to do the career research. We also started on a review of Autodesk Inventor. This was the program they used last year in my course.

6th Grade: 

Only having 6 weeks with 6th grade students is always a struggle for me personally. I always want to go into more detail in lessons but am not able to because of time. This week we briefly covered what is engineering and how engineers use a design process. We also started into our measurement unit. My objective for students is that they should be able to measure in both customary(English) and metric by the time our course is over.