BETHLEHEM, Pa. (Ivanhoe Newswire) -- Think engineering is child's play? Well, for a few months every year in Bethlehem, Pa., it is. Lehigh University mechanical engineering majors and Tyco electronics team up to give middle school students an inside look at the science behind the industry.
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"On your marks. Get set. And they're off, Ladies and Gentlemen!" This is no ordinary day at the races. These cars may hit the finish line in a flash, but each one represents months of planning and preparation by 13-year-old budding engineers.
"My favorite part would probably be designing the car and seeing it come to life through injection molding and a rapid prototype," Paul Hess, a Broughal Middle School student in Bethlehem, Pa. told Ivanhoe. Some tricky terms you wouldn't expect to hear from eighth-graders, but that's exactly the point.
Lehigh University mechanical engineering students are "steering" more than 60 middle school students through the manufacturing expo. College students lead dozens of teams through all the steps of building a matchbox car, starting with computer-aided design. "It's a chain chomp and it's modeled after the Mario games. One of his enemies is a chain chomp," student Alex Knowles says about the car he helped design.
Next, wax molds are cut. Then, aluminum molds are made to form the final product. Plastic pellets are melted and injected into the mold to create the car shapes. The students want something that looks great and moves fast. "Aerodynamics is the main thing; how the front of our car is a lot heavier than the rest," student Evan Wescoe says.
Not every design races well, but in the end the students "win" some valuable insight. "We expose the middle school students to this so they understand really what an engineer does and what he has to do in order to be successful," Chuck Smith, Ph.D., a mechanical engineering professor at Lehigh University, told Ivanhoe. And it may put the teens on a career track they hadn't considered before.
The manufacturing expo has become an annual event. The project is also a requirement for mechanical engineers students at Lehigh University taking classes in manufacturing.
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