Snowballs etc
Hey everyone
This month has been so busy I don't quite know where to start! I've had some great days and some less than great days. I got into trouble in college the other day. It was on the second day of heavy snowfall (check out the pictures under the photos link), and a Friday so I was teaching my first years in the afternoon. We were doing the atomic structures of metals, which gives them their properties. These diagrams are notoriously difficult to visualise and understand properly in 2D, so I decided to take advantage of the copious amounts of moldable matter falling from the sky to try and visualise them in 3D instead and dragged my poor embarrassed students outside to make snow models. So far so good - they got the hang of it well - until the head porter saw us, didn't recognise me, and thought we were naughty students making snowmen (which is strictly forbidden in the Old Quad), and got a bit upset... When I went to try and find him later on to explain and apologise, he'd gone home. I had to leave a note on one of those "While you were out" generic forms: "Dear Mr Important Person Head Porter Sir, Very sorry to have upset you earlier; we weren't making snowmen, but having a lesson in metallurgic atomic structure..." Argh. Anyway, I figured that it was a lesson the students were unlikely to forget (or me either!).
In the spirit of trying to find things that they won't forget, I am endeavouring to make an engineering "Hall of Fame" - where I can use everyday objects to remind them of particular engineering theories and concepts. So far, we have the infamous snowballs (though not strictly relevant to the final application!), buckling instabilities (flicking a coke can), brittle/ductile failure being unrelated to stiffness (the rubber band vs. chewing-gum thing), and perhaps penguin feet for the counterflow heat exchanger (if anyone knows where to get penguin feet from, please let me know ...! ) But there must be more! So, my challenge to the engineers out there - tell me some of the lessons that stuck in your head, and why?
That's all for now ... :-) K
- Posted by flyingkiwi on 01/03/2007.
- flyingkiwi's site
Please sign in or join etribes to add comments.
