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Engineering day hosts more than 400 high-school students

azimmermann@dailyegyptian.com

With his long arm stretched over the metal rail of the fourth floor of Engineering B, Leon Aburime looked at his teammates for the green light.

"Should I drop it here?" the Divernon High School senior asked, his arm shaking as he held the team‚s egg over the ledge.

"I don‚t think you are over the bull‚s-eye, Leon," a member of the team said. "Scoot this way."

A dozen small sidesteps later, the team felt satisfied with their captain‚s position. Aburime leaned a little farther over the rail and sent the foam-wrapped egg plummeting toward the large, spray-painted bull‚s-eye below.

The 5-member team was frozen, leaning over the ledge to see the fruit of their labor. It lay on the outer rim of the bull‚s eye

"I think it broke," said one member.

The team began bickering over the fate of their egg as R.J. Albright, president of the engineering honor society Tau Beta Pi, struggled to unwrap the egg‚s thick outer covering, made of an egg carton, foam and a knee-high.

"Not broken," Albright announced, holding the egg in the air as the team exploded, rejoicing in their success.

The team was participating in the Over Easy Egg Drop as a part of the Engineering Mind Games and Expo hosted by the College of Engineering Thursday. The 23rd-annual event included projects such as card games, paper airplane design contests and other building ventures. More than 400 students from nearly 20 high schools from Southern and Central Illinois came together to partake in more than 10 engineering projects at the Engineering Building as part of National Engineering Week.

Along with enjoying activities like bridge-building and building model hovercrafts, high-school students received points based on their performances. First- and second-place winners received T-shirts, and the overall winner received a $50 SIUC gear prize pack.

Engineering students from various RSOs helped work the event by running and demonstrating the activities and answering questions from the prospective engineers.

Aburime said it was his first time coming to the event and he loves doing hands-on projects like those offered.

"I like seeing the different ways to do things," he said. "I look at things and have to know how they work."

Testing, like Aburime said he likes to do, is a very important aspect of engineering, according to Carlos Cravens, president of the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers.

Cravens was working the Royal House Flush, where students were given three decks of cards and with only that were told to build a structure as tall as possible. Cravens said one of the tallest "houses" of the day was 9.2 inches high.

"Games like this help promote creativity," he said.

Michael Ealy, a sophomore from Beecher City High School, said that he volunteered to come after he heard about it in his chemistry class. He said the engineering day interested him because of the creativity involved, but also because "beating others is always great."

Aburime said he has always wanted to be an engineer because he is constantly taking things apart to understand how they work.

"I love to know about the world around me," he said.