Flying and Running

Today I came in with a talk for each of my classes. The geometry talk was about flight (airplanes, blimps, helicopters), inspired by the importance of angle of attack in wing positioning, and the fact that one of the students previously had asked about airplanes. I opened as usual by asking the basic questions: Why do we want to fly? How do blimps work? How do planes work? How much lift (upward force) do we need? How do helicopters work? The students were very attentive and many of them had some good intuition as to how these machines function. In first hour, I opened with a video of early attempts at flight, which had some funny shots of crazy almost-working flying machines. This did a decent job at grabbing their attention, and they stayed engaged throughout (which is unusual for first hour since they often seem to not be awake). In second hour I didn't have a projector, so I decided to wing it and give the talk using the whiteboard instead. Though we didn't get the video, this actually worked very well. The class was attentive and I had more participation than usual. In third hour I used a hybrid of these techniques, using the video and powerpoint for most of it, but throwing in the whiteboard for one of the concepts. This went fairly well, but they were definitely more energetic and talkative than the other classes, which led to distracting side conversations. One of the students said "that was an interesting topic" at the end, so I at least met that goal for some of the students.

I mentioned to all of my geometry classes that I only have three more weeks in their classroom, and I encouraged them to take advantage of my last four days and ask me good questions. I mentioned in second hour that I won't be here for their last week of school because I'm going to a conference in Portugal, which got them excited since they knew I had gone to Korea back in December. I said something to the effect that it's great because I don't have to pay for any of these trips, which actually got some people to ask why I am going to these places and how many more years they would need to get to where I am. This gave me an opportunity to talk more about engineering and grad school in an environment where they were already interested, which was great.

In fifth hour I brought in a brief discussion on a project I did last year (which I talked about last year in Mr. Lancaster's class) where we designed a shoe that captures energy from running to charge an iPod or other portable electronic device. The talk was very brief (5 slides including a title slide), and the title slide introduced the question "Can running charge your iPod?". The other slides discussed where we get our energy from, and potential sources of "free" energy (sun, geothermal, hydro, wind, human movement), which showed the motivation for the product. I then introduced them to the shoe and brought out and passed around the prototype, and then I asked what questions they had. Fifth hour has always been the toughest audience, but the majority of the students seemed genuinely interested and there were a couple of good questions at the end, and I think the brevity of the formal talk (powerpoint) contributed to that. Ms. Tran really liked it and asked me to talk about this project with the geometry classes next time. I was very pleased with both of these discussions.