RHS engineering takes off
It’s the second year for Russellville High School’s engineering program in the career and technical education department, and it’s already seeing growth.
Instructor Donna Sykes said this is the first year RHS has offered an Engineering 3 class, and next year the school will have an Engineering 4 class as well.
“Every day is a learning experience, and I’m looking forward to seeing the program grow,” Sykes said.
Sykes said each engineering class in sequence is a little more intense and project-based than the one before it. In Engineering 1, students learn the basics of engineering and the different fields of engineering they can go into. They work with circuit kits, 2D drawings and even 3D drawings in Solid Edge, which is a modeling software.
“There are a lot of different things involved and different kinds of engineering the students don’t know about,” Sykes said.
Her Engineering 2 students have worked on a few different projects this year, including building a clay Santa Claus, Christmas tree and presents. One of their biggest projects was a downscaled version of part of the high school campus. The students had to go out and measure the buildings they were going to replicate and scale them such that every 1 inch represented 9 feet of the actual building.
“They put a lot of work into it, and it turned out great,” Sykes said.
Engineering 3 students tackled a problem that was affecting the campus in the fall of 2017. Water runoff floods different areas on campus when it rains, Sykes said, and her students accepted the challenge of coming up with a solution. They surveyed the land and came up with a presentation they gave to the Board of Education.
“I gave them direction, but they did all of the work. They got estimates from businesses for how much it would cost to fix the problem, and they created a PowerPoint that talked about the cause and effect of the problem,” Sykes said.
All of her classes are competing against each other in their individual Goldberg experiments. The Goldberg projects, Sykes explained, are a series of simple devices that work together and create a domino effect of events that lead to a specific end goal.
“They’re really enjoying it. It takes some ingenuity, but they really amaze me with what they come up with,” she said.
Ingenuity is a much-needed skill in engineering, as is math, Sykes said. It’s a tough field, but she said she is reminded of why she loves it so much when she sees her students complete a task or overcome an obstacle and become excited.
“If you can pull a kid in a class like this and put a smile on his face, then it’s worth it,” Sykes said. “I want to spark that interest in them to become engineers.”
One of her students who hopes to pursue an engineering degree is Alex Wells.
By the time he graduates, Wells will have completed almost 50 hours of college courses through dual enrollment, and most of them have been with the CTE department. He said he plans to get his associate’s degree in science from Northwest-Shoals Community College and then transfer to the University of Alabama in Huntsville and either major in mechanical or industrial engineering.
“This is my first engineering class, but I like it. It came easy to me,” Wells said.
He already has his short-term certification in welding and said he plans to go for his full-term certification soon. Over the summer he plans to obtain a machine shop certification as well.
This year Wells has also been visiting Russellville Elementary and West Elementary schools to talking to the students about the engineering field and show them hands-on activities like circuit sets, radios and launch propellers.