Making Life Safer: Engineer Your World Students Study Building in Earthquake Zone (By Patti McLain, Physics & Engineering Instructor)

The Engineer Your World I students are wrapping up the penultimate project of the year. This unit demonstrates the importance of acquiring and analyzing data to inform design decisions. Students use the engineering design process to redesign an apartment building for improved safety in an earthquake-prone region of northeast India.

Through two rounds of building and testing scale models and analyzing the resultant data, students learn about the challenges of collecting, interpreting, displaying, and analyzing data to make and defend informed design decisions while considering necessary trade-offs between building height, building cost, and public safety. After testing their final designs, students document the results. Students opted to try two very different earthquake mitigation techniques: adding truss structures and tuned mass damper.

"Developed by a team of University of Texas faculty, NASA engineers, and secondary teachers working with funding from the National Science Foundation, Engineer Your World is an innovative, student-centered curriculum that engages learners in authentic engineering experiences and inspires them to embrace an engineer’s habits of mind. Collaborative, student-directed projects build resilient problem-solving skills and empower students to think like engineers, to adopt engineering processes, and to pursue engineering disciplines for the betterment of our world." (https://engineeryourworld.org)
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