FOUNDATION FEATURE
After being divided into small groups, the children were asked to choose a book with an engineering chal- lenge they could relate to. Ms. Fecteau’s group landed on a story about a teacher who fears heights. The kids were challenged to design and build a device to get the character safely across a river. Like real engineers, they were given a budget (made up of a fixed number of credits) and had to pick their supplies carefully. In the end, her group designed and built a boat with a working motor, during the two-hour workshop. The team faced setbacks, finding out that the boat was too heavy to float and not particularly waterproof. The big challenge for the kids, then, was to manage their disappointment — and regroup to find new solutions. “We kept it exciting,” says Ms. Fecteau. “If we saw them getting a bit frustrated, we’d say, let’s take a breather and think about this.” Most kids enjoyed the workshop and stuck it out to the end. A handful didn’t want to stop when the allotted time ran out. All of them learned a lot about cooperation, collaboration, and team- building. “It was a huge success,” says Ms. Fecteau. TRIAL AND ERROR, LEARNING AND GROWTH Ms. Hurst has also watched children struggle with setbacks during READesign workshops. Learning from failure, she points out, is a big part of growing up — and a big part of engineering. “Your ideas are not going to work all the time, and you need to be able to learn from your failures and try again. Or you need to take what you’ve learned and apply it to the next situation that comes up.”
Many kids struggle with disappointment when their devices don’t work as planned. But while trying and failing, most of them learn to persevere. Ms. Hurst remembers a boy who left a session frustrated but refused to give up. “As soon as he got home, he pulled out his Meccano set and kept working on his project.” Grownups can find it hard to watch children struggle. “You have to sit on your hands sometimes, but you have to dive in other times. It’s a delicate balance,” says Barbara Madden, P.Eng., a geotechnical engineer and BrainSTEM volunteer. She’s helped with READesign sessions in Fort McMurray. Even when things don’t go entirely as planned, most kids leave the workshop with a sense of accomplishment, Ms. Madden says. “They’ve solved a problem.” Kids also come away with an improved sense of what engineers do. Most of them — even those in Fort McMurray, where there’s a high concentration of engineers and engineering projects — don’t always grasp what engineering is about. Ms. Madden herself had little awareness of it as young person. She stumbled across engineering when her uncle, a videographer, screened a promotional piece at a family function. The video featured a female engineer. “Something clicked for me,” she says. Still, Ms. Madden wasn’t sure she’d enjoy the profession, but she enrolled in engineering just the same. “Now I think it’s great fun.” And so is sharing her profession with a new generation.
‘You have to sit on your hands sometimes, but you have to dive in other times. It’s a delicate balance’ BARBARA MADDEN, P.ENG.
44 | PEG WINTER 2017
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