Engineering advantages
Pilot program gives Coronado kids a college jump start
BY SCOTT PRATER The Slice
Coronado High School senior Camille Kemble designed an airplane wing and
tested it in a wind tunnel last semester.
She and her classmates even held a little competition to see whose wing
could produce the best dragto-lift ratio. She also spent time learning how
altering DNA can help cure serious illness.
These lessons are hard to come by in high school. But Kemble gets them at
Coronado, one of only 14 U.S. high schools to offer Aerospace and
Biotechnical Engineering courses.
The project-intensive courses allow students to perform hands-on experiments
while learning how airplanes fly and how satellites stay in orbit around the
earth.
Kemble’s course work helps her stand apart from other high school students
looking to find their way into engineering school.
“I spoke with an alumnus from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who
was just astounded when he found out I was taking these courses in high
school,” she said.
Kevin Wilson, another Coronado senior and Kemble’s classmate, spelled out
another advantage.
“These courses allow us (high school students) to explore the different
disciplines of engineering,” he said. “We don’t have to pay money for a
college course only to find out it’s not what we’re interested in.”
He likes the interactive learning.
The school earned the right to teach the courses, thanks mostly to its commitment to an existing core of pre-engineering curriculum.
Aerospace engineering instructor Bryce McLean first heard
about the test-course offerings through the schools’ affiliation with
Project Lead the Way, a national organization dedicated to guiding students
toward the engineering field.
McLean said it’s exciting to know he and his students are helping to enhance
future curricula.
He submits an evaluation to “Project Lead the Way” following each project,
like the one where students designed airfoils (essentially, miniature model
airplane wings).
Coronado High School
aerospace engineering students Camille Kemble and Kevin Wilson tinkered with
the school’s wind tunnel.
McLean, a pre-engineering teacher at Coronado for the last three years, attended a two-week training session for the aerospace course last summer, then began teaching the course last fall.
“I got excited because I knew this was something the students were going to buy into,” he said. “I knew the students would get lots of projects they could really have fun with. Plus, we try to use as much technology and software from actual industry so the kids get a good feel for working with it.”
McLean doesn’t lecture much. He sees himself, instead, as a facilitator.
“I find topics for the kids to go out and research, then they come back and present to the class,” he said. “Then we start right in with a project and the kids get to use the information they learned as we work through the project.”
For Kemble, courses are anything but boring.
“In engineering class, they give you a problem and you’re expected to think, not just regurgitate somebody else’s thoughts. That’s what I like most about it,” she said.
Coronado Applied Technology and Pre-Engineering Department chairman Joe Merenda said both courses should become permanent fixtures next school year at Coronado.