Annual Engineering Fair throws unexpected obstacles at students

Wearing oil-field hard hats and thick gloves, the oil extraction team from Pawnee Middle School began pumping oil Wednesday from a canister filled with a vegetable oil and coffee grounds mixture.

While the team looked the part, the bicycle pump contraption the team built to extract the oil proved to be too powerful for the job. The lid exploded off the canister soon after the team began pumping.

That was routine for competitors in the annual Oklahoma Engineering Foundation Engineering Fair at the Oklahoma Science Museum. Team after team of junior high and high school competitors ran into unexpected obstacles that foiled their best-laid plans.

“We learned what we need to do next time,” said Logan Buchanan, an eighth-grader at Pawnee Middle School. “The seal needs to be better, and we need to tape the lid on.”

The Engineering Fair is part of a $400,000 STEM initiative launched by the GE Foundation in partnership with the Oklahoma Center for the Advancement of Science and Technology (OCAST). The initiative was created to inspire greater interest from high school students in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).

Almost 400 students from around the state competed in one of seven engineering challenges that ranged from oil extraction, Eiffel Tower building, electric motors and rubber band-powered vehicles, to a Rube Goldberglike Wacky Wonder Works, solar-powered drones and ping pong ball launchers.

Volunteers from across a variety of STEM industries served as judges for each event.

For the oil extraction competition, Daniel Brue, Ph.D., an engineer with the GE Global Research Center in Oklahoma, led a team of judges who monitored the action. Brue left each team with positive feedback, no matter how difficult the challenge proved to be.

“Most of the time, I’m asking them what they think they should be doing,” Brue said. “So, how would they do it better? What could they improve on? Really, I’m not telling them how to do it better, I’m trying to get them to think about that.”

Brue served as opening speaker at the event, talking to the collective group of students about the career possibilities that engineering provides. He said that’s what the takeaway from the event should be for each student.

“I want them to think about it for the rest of their lives,” he said. “‘How could I have done it better?’ and to take that curiosity to every other problem they attack from now on.”

For some schools, the Engineering Fair is an annual event for which planning goes on weeks in advance. Yukon Public Schools brought 59 students to this year’s event, with young engineers competing across all categories.

“I’ve done this for a lot of years with my students, and we always come back with so much knowledge,” said Jan Marvin, tech education teacher at Yukon. “First of all, they are excited about engineering. They don’t think of some of these things as being actual engineering vocations. When they come here they can see, ‘I had fun doing this and I can have an actual occupation doing something I enjoy.’”