Teams participating in our challenge to design a replacement for the wooden water tower that services the Zoo’s steam locomotives presented their concepts at MSOE on Monday. We have more than 65 students involved, representing ten teams from six high schools. Given the number of students involved, we ran parallel sessions for the reviews, with each team presenting before a panel that included civil engineers from Excel and MSOE, experts in railroad history from The Center for Railway Photography & Art and the Coalition for Sustainable Rail (our partner in this effort), and the staff which maintain and operate the Zoo’s train.
We asked teams to cover, not only their designs, but how they organized their efforts, alternatives they considered, and where they need additional help. Students from Elmbrook’s media program stepped up to record all of the presentations for students and teachers to review.
After a short break for lunch we pulled everyone back together for a recap session with all of the reviewers. That provided an opportunity for the panelists to summarize what they saw in their session within a few broad themes. One of the most interesting things for us was to see the different ways schools with larger groups organized their teams– by functional area of the tower, expertise of the team, member, or into smaller teams who would each produce a design concept. We used the recap session to engage students and teachers in a discussion of how that worked and what it felt like over the course of the semester.
We’re pulling the teachers together next week for a debrief to guide adjustments we’ll want to make as we go into the detailed design phase next semester. That work will begin and end with visits to UWM– first, for a chance to play in UWM’s structures lab, and, on May 2nd, for the detailed design review where the review panelists will select an approach to be fabricated and installed.
We are very grateful to MSOE for hosting the event and working with us to get everything in place. They provided a beautiful setting with the 4th floor conference area inside the Grohmann Tower.
The Journal Sentinel was also on hand to cover the event. You can find their write up here.
The STEM Studio sessions for our Learn Deep Fellows kicked off today at MSOE. Over this week and next our Fellows will work together with input and support from community partners to design of real-word challenges focused on water. Today’s work began with a focus on goals Fellows have for the program. Through repeated cycles of asking “Why?” we saw those goals grow from tactical hopes for the skills students or teachers might development to visions our Fellows have for their students — that they can see themselves as creators, citizens, individuals who can make a difference in their community. We’ll use those much loftier goals drive the vision for projects knowing that we can hit the initial, tactical ambitions along the way.
