West Orange High School hosts first Engineering Carnival

West Orange High School's Project Lead the Way is helping young students to reach their engineering goals through creative thinking and unique skill building. 

On Friday, Sept. 3 the first year Introduction to Engineering Design students hosted their first Engineering Carnival with the help of Priscilla Long, Project Lead the Way and Engineering instructor at WOHS.

"Project Lead the Way offers students an opportunity to use project based learning instead of traditional tests and quizzes," Long said. "We just modified the project a bit to include others. This particular project was such a great opportunity to invite an outside audience to provide a more authentic experience for students. I really believe it is a day that we will all reflect on with a smile!"

The engineering carnival presented games the students had created, relating to a project they had started on the second day of school. 

The project asked students to create a device to propel a small rice bag as far as possible without providing forward momentum to the device. Students then used their device to navigate the engineering design cycle by modifying, testing, and retesting their builds.

Long said the students then added designing for accuracy and precision, before building a carnival style game in which students had a set of criteria and constraints to meet in order to propose a game for an imaginary local carnival.

Senior engineering design and development student, Ryan Washington, helped Long to brainstorm and bring students from Best Buddies to test out the concepts.

The games were set up in the courtyard on Friday and the students collected data on the given criteria and reflected on ways to continue to improve their builds.

"My students and Ms. Krakorian’s students had so much fun," Long said. "Students made adjustments to meet the needs of the players, they made decisions based on what they were observing in their games, and they had an opportunity to consider what it means to design for all users."

Long said that the group plans to hopefully host more engineering carnivals in the future.