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Lawrence Family Development
Charter School

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Future City & Bridge Building Competition

LFDCS Celebrates National Engineering Competition With its Own Celebration

It took an engineering village to stage the Second Annual Engineering Week celebration at Lawrence Family Development Charter School. This event was sponsored by the University of Massachusetts Lowell, Student Chapter of the American Society of Civil Engineers. The event took place at LFDCS on February 26, 2013. Students from 6th, 7th and 8th grade were involved in either one of two different engineering activities, namely—Bridge Building or designing a Future City. The charter school students met once or twice a week, for 5 months, where they built bridges or designed a city 150 years into the future. All students learned many aspects of Civil Engineering, including bridge design, storm water run-off, city design, drawing to scale and properties of different materials. During this time, LFDCS students were mentored by UML Civil Engineering students led by Per Onsager and Cassandra Piortowski. Professor Hajduk from UML oversaw the project and guided his students with mentoring LFDCS students. Middle school students got the chance to ask college students questions about what they were studying, and find out more about engineering as a career. All students worked side by side on the projects and helped each other overcome the frustrations and challenges of a large project.
 
For the Bridge Building competition, the bridges were built according to the competition rules and were tested with a portable load testing device, designed by UML Civil Engineering students. Students celebrated completing the project with prizes for Structural Design, Architectural Design, Original Design, Constructible Design and Best Craftsmanship. The winning team was Alexa Pimental, Giomary Garcia and Gregmari DeLosSantos who were 6th graders who called themselves “Team JAGG.”
 
The Future City competition followed the guidelines set by the National Competition. Judges were led by Reed Brockman, Northeast Regional Coordinator for Future City. Students gave presentations that described the design and engineering behind their models. Each team had a model, built to scale of recyclable materials on a 25” x 50” board. The cities were scored on the basis of creativity, quality of scale, design and use of recycled materials. The winning city was called ”New Pakistan” and was designed by Nahdyn Reyes, Alexa Espinal, Yaina Nunez and Maranyely Ferreira, all 6th graders.

All participants received certificates and t-shirts to celebrate their engineering achievements. This is the second year that LFDCS has run the competition and after-school activity which has proved to be popular with students. This year we had twice the number of students participate compared with the previous year. The plan for next year  is to also have 5th graders involved in after-school engineering.

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