Here’s a look at how teacher Dave Roberts and the students at Westfield Vocational Technical High School in Westfield, MA are progressing with the fischertechnik STEM Lab Program. When we last visited them, the students had just started to familiarize themselves with the fischertechnik construction system itself. Now, just a few weeks later, they have already completed the initial unit on “Sketching and Documentation”, and are now in the midst of the second unit, which focuses on “Mechanical Systems”. As those of you who have viewed one of our webinars on the STEM Lab Program already know (and if you have not, you can view a recording of our most recent STEM education webinar ), at the core of each unit is a different “Student Scenario”. This scenario provides the parameters of a project the students must complete, that essentially acts as an answer to the age-old question of “why do I need to know this?”. In each case the students are given a real world problem they must solve by designing a prototype that addresses that problem. The students must document their design process, discuss what makes their solution unique, and present a demonstration of their prototype in action.

For this particular unit, the “Student Scenario” puts the students in the position of being bicycle designers who have been given the task of designing a concept braking mechanism to be used on a new line of bicycles. This design will be a braking system for racing bikes. The brakes are to be controlled by a hand operated spring loaded lever and will stop a free spinning wheel. The students are provided with various other criteria they must adhere to as well, as well as being asked to create a schematic before they begin the actual building process. All in all, the scenario is designed to mimic the kind of process that a working design engineer would need to follow.

While the students are still not quite ready for their final presentations for this scenario, we thought we would share some photos of their progress so far. What you will see in the following photos is that while there are obviously many elements that are shared by most of the prototypes, there are also many unique approaches to solving this problem being exhibited:

All very interesting approaches, but of course, we still don’t know which will work the best. Next time around, we will share some video of an example of two in action.
If you’d like to know more about the fischertechnik STEM Lab Program, we invite you to attend our next webinar presentation on "Engaging Students in STEM Concepts" on December 10th at Noon Eastern time. Register now. Until next time, happy building!