Engineering students celebrate National Engineers Week with fun activities
3:56 p.m., Feb. 27, 2013--What happens when you combine Nerf guns, paper airplanes and a bunch of engineers?
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In celebration of National Engineers Week (EWeek) 2013, University of Delaware engineering students showcased their aerospace engineering skills during a paper airplane competition atop McKinley Laboratory. The mission: craft an airplane that can hit a target, travel the farthest distance and survive Nerf gun attacks.
The most unique was a short cylindrical model that traveled smoothly several feet when spun into the air.
According to Tom Cender, president of the Mechanical Engineering Graduate Association, which organized the event, opportunities like this allow engineering students to get out of the lab and connect with their peers.
“Finding fun in the most basic engineering challenges brings us all closer, despite our different academic backgrounds,” Cender added.
This year’s theme, “Celebrate Awesome,” encouraged engineers, engineering students, technicians and others to reflect on the wonderful things they accomplish daily to make the world a better place.
“In order to solve today’s most important challenges, engineers must increasingly work across discipline-specific boundaries. This all begins with doing our part to contribute to a science, technology, engineering and mathematics STEM-rich community locally, nationally and globally. At UD, this naturally starts with training and engaging the next generation of great minds our students,” Babatunde Ogunnaike, interim dean of the College of Engineering, said.
Among the other student activities demonstrating engineering spirit on campus were dodge ball and Texas hold’em tournaments, an EWeek carnival, and a broomball match. An induction ceremony into the Order of the Engineer Ring for graduating seniors, among other networking and banquet events, rounded out the student events, while the UD K-12 Engineering program TEAMS competition, which included approximately 50 students from three area high schools, reached potential future engineers.
Article and video by Sarah E. Meadows
Photos by Evan Krape