KIT Summer Science

Over the summer, both KIT and KTC hold workshops to get kids interested in science and technology, and hopefully later attending the schools to learn more about science and technology. One such program was a two day balsa bridge building workshop at KIT for Komatsu Senior High School students.  Komatsu is a small city south of Kanzawa and this particular high school is a fairly high-end science and technology high school. The KIT brige program was designed to be not only an engineering workshop, learning about bridges, but also an English workshop.  Therefore, they called us.

Day one of the workshop was supposed to be all in Japanese, so we didn't attend. The students built balsa wood bridges individually, tested them to destruction by hanging juice boxes off of them, and then either alone or in small groups used the free West Point Bridge Designer software to improve their design (and/or design bridges that looked like a cat). They optimized or in some cases "optimized" (whiskers) their bridge design and decided who would do what  the next day before before leaving.


Day two was English day. The students would build a (hopefully) better bridge in small groups than they previously did on their own and then present their design process in English. They brought in Komatsu English teachers in addition to Lee and I to help the students write the English in their presentations and discuss their bridges in English.  Fortunately, these students had a lot more practice in English than most of our students and were quite motivated, so this was actually possible.  It was very nice to meet more native English speakers, as we know all of them at KIT, and we enjoyed guessing which bridges would be best together (Lee picked two of the top three finishers).

Teams were given points for both bridge strength and creativity in design, so the people who used liberal dashes of crazy in their designs were probably going for the aesthetics award. Professors and students voted for the most aesthetically pleasing bridge, and this was 1/3 of the final score. The number of juice boxes the bridges were able to hold divided by the weight of the bridge was the other 2/3 of the final score. There were three prizes, one for the best design, one for the best strength/weight ratio, and the grand prize.

This was a very interesting project, and in many ways similar to something you might see in an American program. First, individual projects that aren't that great, next learning about the problem, and then joining into small groups to make better projects. The two odd things to us were the foreign language (a given) and placing a high importance on the aesthetic elements of the design. One would seldom, if ever, see this as a consideration in engineering and technical workshops in our experience.  It was clear that at least some teams missed a lot of the subtlties of the instruction, and make mistakes that they were warned against in both the workshop textbook and in the lectures, but overall I suspect at least some of them learned something and most of the students had fun, though an informal poll towards the end did not indicate that many of them were planning to go into engineering.