Courage
Priorities
Faculty and Staff
Advanced Engineering Students Set Sail in the Pool
Students in Dave Collins’s Advanced Engineering class are not strangers to taking on challenges and learning from their failures. Their most recent challenge consisted of building boats from recycled cardboard and duct tape, which culminated in a neck-and-neck boat race in the EHS pool.
Collins noted: “Students today are pushed so far to get things right, and my job is to hopefully teach them that they can fail and that's okay because I’m going to give them a second chance. And they can see improvement and success down the road.”
Students created a small prototype to gain an understanding of the forces that act upon boats in water, find the most optimal shape, and work out any initial issues with the design. The class learned about buoyancy forces and Archimedies’ principle to figure out how much of the boat would be submerged and how stable it would be in the water. They also integrated basic naval architecture and engineering to give them the tools to improve upon their first small scale prototype for their final full size model to successfully float.
Hank Chopra ’23 and Laura Grace Shields ’23 worked together to row their boat, the “D-Colonizer.” As the final boats made it back to the start line, Chopra said proudly, “Laura Grace and I had a really great collaborative experience. Nothing risked, nothing gained.” Shields added that she learned “there's no such thing as too much duct tape!”
Through trial and error, all students were able to successfully row their boats the length of the pool with the cheers of their classmates pushing them forward. To view more photos click here.
