One of my favorite activities/classes is Freshman Academy. An awesome class freshman take their first semester at USC, the class provides great insight into the diverse and numerous paths engineers can take during and after university.
Working with Professor Greenfield as a coach this semester, I am just as excited as the students to see what he has planned for each period. Below are just a few snapshots into the activities we’ve done so far.
1. Peanut Butter & Jelly Competition: a huge part of engineering (regardless of the type) is efficiency and effective communication. Students were challenged to list directions on how to make the most peanut butter and jelly sandwiches given a list of materials during a short period of time. Check out details here at http://youtu.be/_rFdmrNwQSM?a.
2. Lock Box: a theme of the section is security which can be related to something as complex as national cyber protection to a lock box you can buy offline. And that’s exactly what the professor did. Students were challenged to break into a lock box without destroying it’s content. Creative strategies included everything from lock picking to using a band saw.
3. Candy towers: a guest lecturer from the writing department had the students build a structure from candy then describe the steps taken to build the structure. Groups then exchanged instructions and attempted to replicate the structures. The results were interesting to compare–some were almost exact copies while others were extremely different!
Engineering academy: build and instruct with Halloween candy! #viterbiclass pic.twitter.com/rltjz730lg
— Hannah Luk (@hannahgluk) October 30, 2014
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