“I really enjoyed working with the kids,” civil engineer sophomore Carley Burford said. “It’s just really cool that we could get kids interested in engineering at such a young age.”
Adriana Catanzarite
Special to Mustang News
The Society of Civil Engineers (SCE) and the Society of Women Engineers (SWE) visited local classrooms from Feb. 18-21 for National Engineers Week.
The SCE visited Del Mar Elementary in Morro Bay to talk to fourth graders about the different types of civil engineering: structural, traffic, water resources, geo-technical and environmental. They paired the children into groups of five, and each member of the group was allowed to play the part of a structural engineer and direct the others to build a structure out of toothpicks and candy Dots.
“I really enjoyed working with the kids,” civil engineer sophomore Carley Burford said. “It’s just really cool that we could get kids interested in engineering at such a young age.”
Trying to get elementary school children interested in engineering might seem like an impossible task. But Melanie Thatcher, the elementary outreach assistant for SWE, said while most kids didn’t know what an engineer was at first, their interest grew once they realized they would be able to build things.
“It was so inspiring to see their creativity when they were building,” Thatcher said. “Because when you’re a kid, no one tells you what’s possible and what’s not. It really brought back a creative side to engineering. And the designs and ideas that they came up were really interesting and cool, even if not all of them worked.”