Tuesday 5/10 "Lean into my Seismic heart" Title credit to Michaella

Hello! 

Sorry for the delay in posting but wifi and my computer have conspired against me until now on the trip...anyways, today (Tuesday 5/10) was an action packed day at school! The first activity we did with the kids was a civil engineering activity in which students designed structures to withstand the forces of an earthquake. Kate was one of the leaders of this activities and was testing all the structures on a shake table. Therefore the nickname #EarthquakeKate came into effect! This activity was a great opportunity for us to teach the students not only about how to implement truss systems and other methods of reinforcement into their building designs, but also to learn about failure and how to use failure to motivate to do better the next time the new design is tested rather than being very disappointed if an initial design does not work. Engineering after all isn’t always about getting the correct answer the first time, but instead about continuously iterating until the design satisfies the criteria. 

The second activity of the day was biomedical focused where we had the students do an activity to unclog the path to the heart (aka an artery). Here students were given a fake artery (a clear pvc tube) with play doh as the plaque that must be “removed” or flattened against the artery walls so that a path was created for blood flow. This activity lead to students creating stent-like apparatuses to fix the problem of a clogged artery and then a debrief with explanation of currently used methods in the real world to solve this problem. 

The last student activity of the day was Lean Manufacturing where we gave the students an extremely inefficient method of assembling a lego car in which it took ~30 minutes to assemble it. After the students had an opportunity to reevaluate the process and make two changes to the processing rules, the students were able to assemble their cars in less than 10 minutes! This activity introduced students to the importance of IOE and how they make manufacturing processes more efficient. 

During teacher interactions we taught the teachers about admissions to US colleges for international students and specifically gave additional information regarding the University of Michigan’s requirements for admissions. Then we learned about the Indian Cast System. This presentation was extremely interesting because in the US we really don’t have anything that is similar to the Cast System. In India you are born into the cast of your parents and that will always be you cast. If there are inter-cast marriages then the children will automatically inherit the cast of the father. While the cast system is rigid, today it does not determine the jobs you can get. Anyone can serve in legislation and can become educated and achieve higher jobs. However, there are almost benefits to being of lower casts because the Indian Government still relies heavily on “Reservations.” The most similar thing in the US I can equate this concept to is “Affirmative Action” because Reservations are when there is a HIGH amount of college admissions (among other things) reserved specifically for the lower cast, less privileged and oppressed (gender, sex, religion, economic status, etc.). Naturally, reservations can be just as controversial as affirmative action, but generally it sounds like many Indian citizens feel it is fine to have such a system to ensure diversity even if that means adjusting admission policy.

P.s. the pictures are of Michaella and the students handing over one design prior to testing of the seismic loading; the BCA building we are working at; and a sign I particularly liked in the classroom.