Engineering expo teaches kids the fun of making things work

Gavin Coronado and some of his friends did not want to get up early and let his mom drag them to the Wichita Society of Women Engineers Engineering Expo at Century II on Saturday.

“We were at my grandma’s, and my cousin there had a guitar and an Xbox, so we didn’t want to come here,” said Gavin, age 10. “But it was so worth it to come here.”

Gavin, wearing the blue Webelos uniform of Cub Scout Pack 515, based at the Church of the Blessed Sacrament in Wichita, showed up at the expo with nine other mostly uniformed Webelos and Bear Cub Scout friends. Parents Sarah and Isaac Coronado had brought them, and watched them sample the engineering goods.

The boys all raised their hands when the nice Kansas Highway Patrol trooper, C.M. Crittenden, asked if they wanted to ride the “seat belt convincer,” which went BANG and simulated a low-speed crash with seat belts – with boys strapped safely in the seat.

They hung out with civil and mechanical and electrical engineers and volunteers, and performed various hands-on magic. There was everything from robotics to Legos to dogs to sailplanes.

Dozens of kids showed up as soon as the expo opened Saturday morning. They got schooled in all sorts of innovation and problem solving by some of Wichita’s finest engineering minds.

The MakeICT guys were there, including artist and teacher Tom McGuire and John Harrison, who teaches engineering and plays lead violin in the Wichita Symphony. Those two were showing off to kids, as usual, demonstrating homemade 3-D printers – and how they’d cobbled together a talking digital card reader from pieces of scrap wood and paper clips. MakeICT is a local group of inventors who double as artists, musicians and teachers; they teach innovation to local people.

Gavin Coronado and friends, with help from civil engineering volunteers, even used toothpicks stuck into mini-marshmallows to build model bridge trusses with triangle-support configurations. The great thing about those trusses, one volunteer called out to the boys, is that not only do triangles make a stronger truss, “but with triangles and marshmallows, you can also eat part of the building material, if you want.” Gavin thought eating the materials was a good suggestion.

Sanjuana Martinez, a volunteer who helped show Gavin and the other boys a bit of engineering, is a Gates Millennium Scholar from Wichita State University’s College of Engineering.

All children, including her, she said, start out life with likes and dislikes. “There’s always a class you don’t like” she said – math, or something else.

But if scholars like her can show the fun and fulfillment of making inventions and other things work, the kids will probably buckle down, as she did, and study anything. “That’s how I got interested in biomedical engineering,” she said.

Nobody could fly in the fully functional but grounded sailplane that Harry Clayton was showing off. (Century II’s display room was big, but not that big.)

But plenty of kids were coming up to Clayton, a senior research engineer from the National Institute for Aviation Research, and asking about the aircraft.

“It’s important to show this off, because what’s walking in here today is our next generation of pilots,” Clayton said.

This story was originally published February 21, 2015 at 2:55 PM with the headline "Engineering expo teaches kids the fun of making things work."