ASME volunteers spread word at Boy Scout Jamboree

Henry Baumgartner
ASME NEWS

You hope you can find one or two kids who are interested in engineering," said John Jones of his experiences at the Boy Scout Jamboree, "and I think there were a few."

Jones, a senior advisory engineer with Framatome Advanced Nuclear Power in Lynchburg, Va., was at the mass gathering of Scouts as one of a group of about 20 ASME volunteers who were there to spread the word that engineering is fun and is a pretty good career, too.

The 10-day jamboree, which was held at Fort A.P. Hill in central Virginia at the end of July, takes place every four years and attracts more than 40,000 participants. This was the second time ASME had been represented there.

The ASME group, which included Willard Nott, ASME's vice president for Pre-College Education, helped staff two highly active booths at the event. At the Engineering Merit Badge booth, Scouts could learn about engineering and fulfill the requirements for the badge. The other booth was connected with the Scouts' Learning for Life affiliate, which includes the Exploring program aimed at high schoolers and includes girls and others who are not included in the standard Boy Scout constituency.

The Exploring program is usually thought of as more career-oriented, with posts devoted to a particular field — engineering is one of the most popular — that are sponsored by engineering firms, manufacturing companies and governmental bodies. But at the Jamboree, that booth attracted streams of mostly younger visitors, according to Jones, who was one of the volunteers manning the booth. That may be due to the hands-on learning opportunities provided, such as a laboratory wind tunnel, courtesy of Jack Gilbert, president of GDJ Inc. of Willoughby, Ohio.

ASME volunteer Mahesh Aggarwal helped open the world of engineering to many Boy Scouts.

An even bigger draw was a bridge-designing competition, using a CAD program known as West Point Bridge Designer, developed at the military academy, which came with 10 West Point cadets assisted booth volunteers, overseeing a design competition among Scouts.

The Merit Badge booth helped the Scouts through the requirements for the badge, which were recently revised with the help of the Board on Pre-College Education's Boy Scouts Task Force (See "ASME lauded for updating Boy Scouts' Engineering Merit Badge Guide" in the August issue of ASME NEWS.)

The ASME volunteers shared their instructional duties with a team from ACDelco, an auto parts manufacturer from Grand Blanc, Mich. After the ACDelco engineers would lecture a group of Scouts for an hour, the ASME people would then sit down at a table with four or five of the Scouts and take them through the process of designing a gizmo of their choice, as well as helping them fulfill such badge requirements as "talking to an engineer."

"We would lead them in understanding a major project, what it's like to design something, sketching, brief practice in the systems engineering design process," said Tim Lancey, an ASME Fellow and the Society's liaison to the Boy Scouts, who is a professor of mechanical engineering at California State University, Fullerton. Projects included a patrol box, which is used by Scouts to carry cooking gear, different kinds of fire starters and a design for the gateway to the campground.

Bill Salmon, another ASME Fellow in attendance, is retired from the science office of the U.S. Department of State and has served as executive officer of the National Academy of Engineering. He mentioned a few other devices the teams designed, such as a radio powered by a combination of solar power and a hand-wound spring.

The tent was also well-supplied with "toys," noted Sue Baldwin, a retired engineer at Duke Power's Oconee Nuclear Station in South Carolina. Baldwin said that a bicycle hooked up to a generator was particularly popular, as the kids would pedal and pedal, and the lights would go on.

Baldwin attended with her husband Don, formerly of BP Amoco. The couple operate their own firm, Baldwin Energy Co., in Central, S.C., and are, respectively, treasurer and vice chair of the Greenville, S.C., Section.

Thousands of young people were introduced to engineering at the Boy Scout Jamboree.

There was also a thunder toy, a cardboard cylinder with a parchment drum head and a quarter-inch-diameter spring attached; shake the spring and you got a noise like thunder. "It made a heck of a racket," Baldwin said. It also demonstrated how the oscillations of the spring were amplified by the cylinder.

Everyone seemed to agree that the effort was well worthwhile. "Most of them had a genuine interest in engineering," Salmon said, though a few were more interested in getting another badge.

According to Jones, the volunteers "enjoyed it as much as the kids." Jones was there with his son Matthew, a college student studying to be a systems engineer.

Like most of the ASME volunteers interviewed for this story, Don Baldwin said that he was eager to participate again. "We only volunteered for two days, but I wish we'd been there all week," he added.

"We need more ASME people and more demonstrations, because the kids were very interested," Sue Baldwin pointed out. "I've already volunteered for next time," Lancey said.

The Baldwins have also rejoined the Scouting movement and are trying to sponsor more activities with kids locally.

But ASME members who don't want to wait four years for the next jamboree, can help set up engineering Explorer posts in their own communities, noted Tom Perry, who is the director of engineering education at ASME.

"Engineering is one of the most popular" of Exploring fields, noted Cliff Takawana, associate director of Learning for Life, who said that 20,000 people had gone through the Exploring booth this year.

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