What can you learn about engineering from a piece of tissue paper and a shoe that barely resembles one? Quite a lot, as students in math and engineering teacher Amanda Longo’s Project Risk Taker (PRT) Principles of Engineering course recently discovered.
The project begins with a quick design challenge. Students must create a shoe out of tissue paper, put it on, walk around the classroom and then take it off, with the shoe still recognizable as a shoe. From there, the challenge becomes much more complex as students move from designing for themselves to designing a shoe around the specific needs of a client.
Working in teams, students work through the engineering design process from beginning to end. They develop concepts and technical sketches, use a decision matrix to evaluate possible solutions, build and test prototypes, make modifications based on their findings and ultimately produce a final design. They then create a commercial for their product and present their design process and results to the class.
The course itself is designed to give students an integrated engineering experience, with Principles of Engineering taught alongside Honors Algebra II with math teacher Christopher Emery and Honors Physics with NYS Master Teacher Dennis Quackenbush. The shoe project brings those disciplines together in a hands-on way, requiring students to apply mathematical and scientific thinking while making practical design decisions.
“This project gives students the opportunity to experience what engineers actually do,” Longo said. “They start with a problem, develop possible solutions, make decisions about their design, build something, test it and then go back and make it better. They have to think about their client throughout the entire process, and that makes the engineering feel real.”
By the end of the project, students have more than a finished shoe. They have practiced the process of taking an idea from an initial sketch to a tested product and learned that good engineering often means being willing to rethink a design when the first solution doesn’t work as planned.
