Communication from Ron

Hi All!

By now I hope everyone is reading this site. Here is some good info.

First of all, there is a great project opportunity for any of you in the Aluminum Canoe design/build. I used it in my Intro to Engr at the college and Melissa & Ed are using it right now in their 9th grade POE at GRHS. Here is the assignment:

Given one pack of lath (48 pieces), 1 roll of duct tape, 100 sq feet of aluminum foil, and hot glue, make a canoe to be raced.

This project will take about 1.5 weeks of class time, but it is awesome for building student enthusiasm and is quite visible to our schools and communities. To see some of the canoes, go to my personal blog: thebottomlineru.blogspot.com and scroll down to last week.

I have money to help you buy supplies if you like.

Secondly, here is an offer: Last week our 75 first year students put together 40 different presentations (8-12 minutes) on "The 20 greatest engineering achievements". Some of these are really good. If you would like us to put together a group of 4 (~50 minutes) of these and have the students come to your class to give the presentations, just let me know and we will set it up.

Finally, I hope to encourage you to keep up with this site. As you learned in your training, the most effective thing we can teach our students is how to perform well in a group -- it leads to the best results. Well, the way I see it, we are a group searching for good results.