What exactly do engineers do? For Engineers Week (Feb. 20-26), Brown and Caldwell engineers plan to spend time in classrooms showing kids what it means to be an engineer and how engineering makes everyday life possible.
To meet these goals, Engineers Bradford Dickson, Lizbeth Maldonado, Sam Hawkinson, Max Armenta, and Marissa Tsuruda have been hard at work putting together the Egg Drop Program through Brown and Caldwell’s partnership with the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission and the creative reuse nonprofit SCRAP.
By reusing materials donated to SCRAP, the engineers put together Egg-Drop-in-a-Box sets containing everything needed to perform the classic engineering activity where students design and create the best rig to safely drop eggs. Throughout the week, BCers will go to local Northern California schools to assist with the experiments.
“We hope that students learn something about gravity and physics, but also the many different ways that one can address an engineering problem,” Bradford said. “For example, do you wrap the eggs in soft material or hard? Should the egg protection be a bland color or colorful? Does adding too much padding to the egg lead to other problems because engineering is a balance between materials and costs? Or, how many times can a protected hardboiled egg bounce before it cracks? The possibilities are endless.”
BC Engineer Ho-Shing Chau developed the Paper Bridge Kit through ASCE San Francisco Younger Member Forum.
And for those not in the classroom, there’s a virtual option too, a downloadable Paper Bridge Kit.
Both in-person and virtual kits include Engineers-in-Training (EIT) in Training certificates, which is a play on the EIT certification that real engineers acquire. Students can sign the certificates just like real engineers.
“Student outreach is so important,” said Ho-Shing Chau, the BC engineer who developed the Paper Bridge Kit through ASCE San Francisco Younger Member Forum. “The sooner kids can see how stuff works, they can see themselves doing it too.”
For aspiring engineers and scientists, BC offers five scholarships — Eckenfelder Scholarship, LGBTQIA+ Scholarship, Minority Scholarship, Navajo Nations Scholarship, Women in Leadership Scholarship — to help them on their education journey. The scholarships are open through April 1.
Learn more about BC’s scholarships and apply: https://brownandcaldwell.com/careers/scholarships/
Learn more about the SCRAP-in-a-box program: https://www.scrap-sf.org/programs/scrap-in-a-box
Learn more about Engineers Week: https://discovere.org/engage/engineers-week/
Engineers Week was founded in 1951 by the National Society of Professional Engineers to ensure “a diverse and well-educated future engineering workforce by increasing understanding of and interest in engineering and technology careers.”