Students create balloon-powered toy cars
UNM students from Mechanical Engineering’s Formula Society of Automotive Engineers race car design class recently helped show two fifth grade classes at Monte Vista Elementary school how to build balloon-powered toy cars. The goal of the class was to use an engineering problem-solving process to respond to a request from a fictitious toy company to create an appealing toy that travels far, carries weight or goes fast.
Photo: Fifth graders at Monte Vista Elementary School test their balloon-powered toy cars.
For the final class, the fifth-graders demonstrated their working model, presented their test data and explained why they designed the car the way they did.
The three-week class involved using a problem-solving process employed by engineers in design teams and taught at many engineering schools across the country. The student teams explored the principles of jet propulsion, friction and air resistance, and experimented with different chassis designs and nozzle sizes to determine their effect on the balloon-car performance. Certificates of achievement will be given to those teams who most closely met the requirements they set.
The project is part of larger program, “A World in Motion,” that was developed by the Society of Automotive Engineers. The various projects are usually taught by elementary school teachers in grades 4-8 with engineers as consultants. The UNM School of Engineering team is the first to actually instruct the fifth graders.
Last week, the Monte Vista Elementary students visited the mechanical engineering laboratories, where they learned how students from the UNM Mechanical Engineering Department’s Formula SAE Team develop, design, test, analyze and then drive a formula-style race car. The UNM students participate in an international formula race car competition every year and have finished as high as 14th in a field of 140.
Media Contact: Karen Wentworth, (505) 277-5627; e-mail: kwent2@unm.edu
Posted by scarr at March 19, 2007 12:26 PM