On October 29th a few fellow Ambassadors and I had the opportunity to visit the Pittsburgh Science & Technology Academy. The school was absolutely amazing! It is actually part of the Pittsburgh Public School System but students have to apply to get into this specific school. The school is only a few years old and has students from grades 6-10 so far and next year they will be adding 11th grade, so by the Fall of 2012 it will have all the way up to 12th grade. The school itself was right in the middle of the University of Pittsburgh campus. The kids in the high school grades each had their own laptops to bring to class! I definitely didn’t have that when I was in high school! Catrina and I had the chance to talk to three different 9th grade biology classes. We spoke to them about some of the cool advancements in prosthetics. They had already learned about some stuff in class and even did an entire paper on prosthetic arms. We talked about one method of using a person’s own nerves to stimulate a muscle in their chest to move a prosthetic arm. It was some really interesting technology that is becoming more main stream. All the students asked really great questions, the Ambassadors were really impressed!
Katie and Adrienne got to speak to some of the younger students in 6th grade. They did a short presentation on the structure of bones and led a design activity. The kids had to create the tallest and strongest bone they could out of newspaper and masking tape! There were some very good designs!
Ginger and Whitney spoke to a 10th grade engineering class (how cool is that? I wish I would’ve had an engineering class in high school!) and 8th grade physics classes. In the engineering class they spoke about what makes a building “green”. They tied in what engineers do to help out with the environment when they are building structures. Then in the 8th grade physics classes they made a short presentation on kinetic and potential energy in roller coasters. The students were then split up into small groups to build their own roller coasters out of pipe insulation, toothpicks, and masking tape. Their designs had to pass the safety test with marbles acting as real people!
At SciTech they have Science Forum every two wee
ks where they bring in different speakers for the kids to learn more about some of the cool stuff going on in science. In the middle of the day the Ambassadors split up into two groups to give Science Forum presentations. Whitney, Ginger, and Adrienne did an engineering careers presentation all about the new Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh to the middle schoolers. They talked about what engineers did to make the building so high tech. Then they helped out with the bridge building project that the students had been working on in class. Katie, Catrina, and I spoke to the high schoolers about the Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh as well, but a little bit more in depth than the middle school presentations. Once again the students had lots of great questions for us!
We all really enjoyed the trip and it sounds like the students enjoyed having us go talk to them as well! We’re really looking forward to working with them again soon!
-Julie Bickel
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