Engineers Week 2001
For National Engineers Week (February 19 – 24), the Illinois Institute of Technology will host an open house at it’s Rice Campus in Wheaton, Illinois showcasing current technology through displays and demonstrations given by middle and high school students interested in engineering.
“In previous years, Engineering Week consisted of a lot of adults talking about engineering to the students. This year, we have shifted to having students present topics to each other and to the adults,” says Barbara Kozi, chair of the DuPage Engineers Week Steering Committee.
High school and middle school students will give presentations on survivors of smoking-related illnesses, robotics, noise abatement and auto safety. “Designing and working on these projects at their own schools and then presenting them to their peers at Engineers Week really gets the students motivated and interested in engineering as a possible career,” says Kozi. Part of the thrust of Engineers Week is to get students thinking about the courses they will need to take in high school to prepare for engineering colleges.
In addition to school presentations, there will also be a Rube Goldberg contest. Eighteen teams of students will demonstrate their machines at Engineers Week. Rube Goldberg was a cartoonist in the 1930s and 1940s who devised unique and complicated devices to perform simple tasks like cracking an egg. By building Rube Goldberg machines, the students use various engineering principles as well as demonstrate their ingenuity and creativity.
The Rice Campus Open House is on Saturday, February 24 from 12:00 noon to 4:00 p.m. The Illinois Institute of Technology Rice Campus is located at 201 East Loop Road in Wheaton. For more information on Engineers Week, visit the National Engineers Week website at www.eweek.org.
Founded in 1890, IIT is a Ph.D.-granting technological university awarding degrees in the sciences, mathematics and engineering, as well as architecture, psychology, design, business and law. IIT’s interprofessional, technology-focused curriculum prepares the university’s 6,200 students for leadership roles in an increasingly complex and culturally diverse global workplace.
