1. March 2009www.cadsociety.org Thinking About Engineering March 2009

2. www.cadsociety.org What is Engineering?

3. March 2009www.cadsociety.org Is it?

4. March 2009www.cadsociety.org Is it?

5. March 2009www.cadsociety.org Is it?

6. March 2009www.cadsociety.org What is it? It is all of these and more

7. March 2009www.cadsociety.org What is Engineering? From Wikipedia.com –“Engineering is the discipline and profession of applying technical and scientific knowledge and utilizing natural laws and physical resources in order to design and implement materials, structures, machines, devices, systems, and processes that safely realize a desired objective and meet specified criteria.”disciplineprofessiontechnicalscientificknowledge materialsstructuresmachinesdevices systemsprocesses

8. March 2009www.cadsociety.org What we think engineers are Argh!

9. March 2009www.cadsociety.org Think Again Engineers are good at: –Making things –Inventing things –Designing things –Repairing things –Breaking things And they often look just like the rest of us!

10. March 2009www.cadsociety.org Breaking Things

11. March 2009www.cadsociety.org Engineers can be nerdy but… Not all of them are…here are some examples

12. March 2009www.cadsociety.org Toy Designer Shannon Bruzelius Toy Designer –Invents new toys, especially pool toys –Keep swim gear handy to test in pool –Tests walkie-talkies and other toys with colleagues out on the streets

13. March 2009www.cadsociety.org Wii Fit Inventor Shigeru Miyamoto Dreams up new games for Nintendo Wii including –Donkey Kong & Mario –Wii –Wii Fit

14. March 2009www.cadsociety.org Do you need to be a trained engineer? It helps a lot but amateur engineers have delivered many incredible products and ideas –Thomas Edison – first commercial light bulb –Wright brothers (bicycle mechanics) – first airplane –Thomas Jefferson (president) – swivel chair –George Washington (president) – farm equipment

15. March 2009www.cadsociety.org NASA Gloves NASA held a competition in 2007 to try and create usable gloves for astronauts, instead of the immobile gloves they currently used –Unemployed engineer, Peter Homer and his 14 year old son Matt, designed and built a more flexible glove for astronauts –They used Duct tape as a prototype

16. March 2009www.cadsociety.org iPOD Kane Kramer –Invented the idea in 1979 –Patented in 1980 –Amateur Inventor

17. March 2009www.cadsociety.org Wristies 10 year old Kathryn Gregory According to Wristies, "On a cold and snowy winter's day, 10 year old K-K Gregory was out building a snow fort when her wrists started to hurt because they were cold and wet. She remedied the problem by inventing Wristies, and wore them under her coat and mittens.*

18. March 2009www.cadsociety.org Would you like to be an engineer? An engineer is someone who sees a problem and works out how to fix it. An engineer can be an every day person, or highly trained An engineer solves puzzles and problems of every day life An engineer can make the difference

19. March 2009www.cadsociety.org What next? If you have a product that doesn’t work well –If you have an idea on how to improve something (like Kathryn Gregory) –Think about how you would fix it Join FIRST groups in the area Tinker

20. March 2009www.cadsociety.org What can you do? Products that we have today are often not ‘good enough’. If you have one, think about how it could be better Start simple projects such as solar powered toys Join FIRST and other such organizations Tinker