The Engineering, Design, and Innovation Fellows 2020 cohort traveled  to Kent, CT to participate in the pre-Engineering Summer Educational Experience at Kent School program and to engage in Center for Civic and Global Leadership and EDI-specific leadership and teamwork programming.  

Blog post by Sarah Haugh, ’20

Hello everyone! Welcome to our blog! My name is Sarah and I’m an EDI fellow from the class of 2020. As many of you know we are up in Connecticut taking part in a pre-engineering program at Kent School. We started off today with our first “class”, either solar cells or working on our robots. My group started off working on the solar cells. Since we had made them the day before, the point of doing it again was to try and make a combination of berries that would better absorb the sun and create more power. Making them again today was more relaxed because we all knew the procedures and were able to make them ourselves. After that first session, we all went down to the digital fabrication lab. Dr. Nadire gave us a presentation explaining 3D printers, then demonstrated how to get it to print. He also showed us the many different types of printers and the important differences between them including size, capacity, and colors. After this presentation, which lasted about an hour and a half, we headed back to campus for lunch. Everyone got some food and once we were all feeling more energized, the five of us and Ms. McCallum headed back to the dorms for our daily meeting.  After our meeting, we were kindly driven back to the pre-e building by Ms. McCallum. This gave us all some extra time to work on whatever we wanted. Around 1:00, everyone had arrived back at the pre-e building and we got back to our activities. We did not go to solid works because the application was down, so instead we spent more time working on our robots. The robots will compete in a competition in a game called starstruck. If you search it online there are many YouTube videos explaining how to play. Later, the whole group headed out for a short hike to Bull’s Bridge. The hike was beautiful! The whole time you could see the river off to the side and many people would be swimming or fishing down in the river. We closed off our day with some time to work on solid works (it works now!) and then it was time for our nightly meeting, followed by bed! Hope you enjoyed this post and check back tomorrow for another post!