Starkville High sudents use the design engineering process to create biodomes in their study of Environmental Engineering.
Starkville High School students in our Engineering & Mechatronics CTE pathway experienced the real-life work of Environmental Engineers during a recent ongoing project that saw them creating biodomes and designing systems inspired by nature.
Ms. Tina Cockrell, Engineering instructor at the Millsaps Career and Technology Center, takes a different approach to helping students explore careers in engineering, beyond just reading from a textbook. For various engineering emphasis areas, she designs hands-on projects that lead students to participate in and experience the type of work required in each field of study.
"Rather than lecture about each engineering discipline," she said, "I design real-world application projects that mimic actual jobs that engineers perform in the discipline we are discussing."
She says students enjoy the collaboration and hands-on approach, and it helps them better understand what it might be like to work in a particular discipline. The use of project-based learning allows students to have a more real-world experience of the core concepts in a career pathway and to be better equipped to make decisions about what they want to do after high school. The district's emphasis on creativity, critical thinking and collaboration provides a rich experience of the subject matter as students work together to solve problems.
When describing this unit, Ms. Cockrell said the engineering design project gave students practical experiences they might be tasked with if they worked as an actual Environmental Engineer. She is quick to highlight that each unit emphasizing an engineering discipline helps students know the role those workers play in everyday life.
"In all industrial applications and in various government agencies, environmental engineers are critical people resources," she said. "They help industries understand and comply with regulations, in government agencies they develop regulatory policies, and as in this project, they design systems, buildings, and sustainability design for the betterment of mankind."
For this two-part project, students used the engineering design process to build biodomes of two specific environments. The biodomes provided a way to study their ecosystems by modeling how organisms interact in their natural environment. The project is an example of what an Environmental Engineer would do in the workplace to conduct sustainability research, perform impact assessments, design for resilience, and for species conservation. Over a seven-week period, students added different species to their biomes and made scientific observations about the changes they saw in each environment.
For the second part of the project, students focused on biomimicry and created a building or system for moon inhabitation that was inspired by nature.
"Bio means life and mimic means to imitate," Ms. Cockrell said. "Engineers have designed systems based on this idea for many years, and I wanted the students to grasp this concept of engineering design."
For the biomimicry portion of the project, one group of students designed a water recovery system based on the desert beetle and others designed a heating and cooling system based on how termites heat and cool their mounds/colony. For each phase of the project, students built models and also development presentations to share their work.
The next engineering discipline students are exploring is Mechanical Engineering, and Ms. Cockrell says students are designing mini catapults and automata devices (or self-operating machines.)