This week was all about civil engineering, or designing and building things to help civilization! The students started the day by checking out a video summarizing the main parts of the career. The students made connections to the video and how civil engineer's work impacts their life. They then learned about the Engineering/Design Process: Ask, Imagine, Create, Improve. Most of the class was spent enacting the process through and engineering challenge! They had to work with a partner to create a Lego bridge that could span a river without touching the water. As they completed this challenge, they were given more and more challenges to test things like strength, stability, and efficiency in order to improve their design. Some of the teams build bridges that held hundreds of pennies! Others build very efficient bridges that used as few Lego bricks as possible but could still hold at least 30 pennies.

The students were so excited about this challenge, that we decided to keep their bridges intact so that they can continue working on them during future classes. 

We also had a special guest at the end of our day, Professor Robyn Mattison, a civil engineering professor at BSU! She told us about all of the ways civil engineers impact our lives and answered lots of questions that the students had about the career. It was awesome to have a female representative from the engineering field visit our class!