By Xander Kaleas and Chloe Gibson, Year 9, Cairns State High School
Workshops designed to inspire engineers of tomorrow
ENGINEERS Without Borders Australia (EWB) is a memberbased non-profit organisation that creates systemic change through humanitarian engineering.
EWB presented a number of workshops on topics including: water for life, appropriate construction, prosthetic leg, energ; and sustainable bridge activities to Cairns High students.
The workshops were designed to help foster a new generation of scientists and engineers while giving students an understanding of appropriate technologies in developing communities.
Having the presentation on future jobs in engineering gave us a chance to explore options on what we want to do in our future.
We all now have a much broader understanding of exactly what an engineer does.
The talk was inspiring and interesting, enabling the class to find out different types of engineering, and what could suit us best.
The hands-on approach enabled the class to team up and construct a raft out of resources such as recycled materials and pool noodles.
We were challenged to hold as many weights as we could on our raft while still staying afloat.
This was all done with only a budget of $40.
The activity was really fun and it tested our teamwork, leadership skills, our mathematical ability, our knowledge of physics and much more.
The group really enjoyed exploring different engineering pathways we didn’t even realise existed.
It has inspired many of us to possibly follow in the footsteps of the speakers and maybe become an engineer one day.
An engineer does, not only work with cars, but in fact many different types of transportation, robotics, electrical and more.