Calm Before the Storm

Things are about to start getting a little crazier for me coming up with UPSM, but I'm getting excited. I've got my first full class period coming up this Friday where it will somehow be my job to command these kids' attention :) The field trip I organized to the LNF Nanofab in the EECS building is coming up (February 17th if anyone is interested in helping from around 9 am - 3 pm let me know (afkaplan@umich.edu)) and the next week I have another lesson planned where I'm either going to summarize and go over some of the details of their field trip, or possibly just pick what they think was the coolest topic and go a little deeper into it.

For the lesson at hand, I'm going with the DC Motor project which I think is a nice, quick hands-on activity that we can get done in one period. There's also a fair amount of room to talk about design improvements, etc. which I think is really the most critical part of this. I think quite a few of the kids are interested in engineering, but training them to think like one is a little tougher and that's the whole point of the class. I plan on running over the general operation of what they're about to build, having them build it, then working on troubleshooting and improvements with them at the end. Not sure if anyone else got to do this in school, but you basically have to wind copper wire, hook it up to a power supply, and place it over magnets to create a simple induction motor. I actually didn't even do this until college, but I think it's a great start for the kids to get interested in electrical engineering.

Of course I'll update everyone on the details when I get through with it. BTW, thank you for your suggestions, Carol! I plan on leaving some time at the end to get started with the kids on the typing contest to keep them interested and hopefully a little competitive ;)