High school students take Washington dignitaries on a ride

Mary Legatski
ASME Government Relations

Students enrolled in pre-engineering classes at two public high schools in the metropolitan Washington, D.C., area presented their roller coaster fabrication designs at a special event held on Capitol Hill last month.

The project, developed by ASME members Jessica Barzilai and Jeff Leaf, who teach engineering and physics at the respective schools, was designed to provide students with a real-world engineering systems integration experience.

"We've tried to give the students an open-ended design project that would stretch the limit of their capabilities while allowing them to experience the business and hands-on work of engineering through this simulated exercise," said Leaf, who teaches at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology and is vice president of ASME's Board on Pre-College Education.

Tenth-grade students enrolled in the Engineering Concepts survey course at Dunbar Pre-Engineering School, which is part of Dunbar High School located in the District of Columbia, were tasked with designing a roller coaster that would meet both customer "thrill demand" and existing roller coaster safety standards.

A student on the Mission Impossible team demonstrates roller coaster fabrication design.

Pre-engineering students at Jefferson, located in Fairfax County, Va., had responsibility for designing the mechanism to put the coaster in motion, as well as the sensing and crash avoidance control systems. To simulate a real-world working relationship between a primary contractor (Dunbar) and a subcontractor (Jefferson), the students communicated their respective designs via e-mail, meeting in person only once before the late May event.

Having assigned their product designs appropriately distinctive names, the contractor/subcontractor teams detailed the challenges of designing a "thrill" coaster that jeopardized neither rider safety nor enjoyment, while minimizing construction and operation and maintenance costs.

Da Rolla Coasta and Ride or Die, both touted as "scary" designs incorporating at least three thrills into the ride, each jumped the guardrail during the presentation.

The Nike Experience, a state-of-the-art wheel-less coaster operated by magnetic levitation, was impressive, with distinctive cars shaped like Nike footwear but also jumped the track.

Mission Impossible, a six-car coaster built to a 1-foot-equals-100-foot scale and weighing 9,000 pounds with a peak velocity of 65 miles per hour, defeated its competitors by completing the course without going off-track.

Numerous dignitaries from the District of Columbia and the Fairfax County school systems witnessed the four teams' presentations. They included D.C. delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, herself a graduate of Dunbar High School and now the District's sole (nonvoting) representative to the U.S. Congress.

Norton expressed her gratitude to Barzilai and Leaf "for encouraging young people to pursue this advanced work" and her hope that "what these two high schools have done will be a harbinger of things to come" in promoting engineering, science and technology education.

ASME International is a strong supporter of strengthening the nation's K-12 education curricula in science, mathematics, engineering and technology (SMET). The Society's general position paper on SMET education may be viewed at www.asme.org/gric/00-08.html.

For more information on K-12 education issues, contact Patti Burgio at (202) 785-3756 or at burgiop @asme.org.

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