My Story
My parents are both engineers… I had no idea what I wanted to be when I grew up, but I definitely didn’t want to be an engineer. Until physics changed everything. After being required to take the subject in high school, I began seeing physics everywhere. Knowing why things happened the way they did gave me a sense of admiration for the man-made inventions that took laws of nature and molded them to create modern marvels. What had seemed like ordinary appliances now became intricate machinery as I began to understand how everything operated. Engineering became my perspective of the world.
Since then, I created a nanobot for the Exploravision competition and was the only participant from Arizona to win national distinction, and started a tutoring business for physics and mathematics. I also learned many programming languages through a Harvard software course and Codecademy over quarantine.
My Project
My project is going to be teaching a six-session course in introductory physics, primarily the principles of physics involved in engineering. The course won’t focus on formulas and numbers; instead, the focus will be fun activities that illustrate the concepts in the lessons.
My plan is to teach the lesson for an hour, and then have an hour and a half dedicated to doing a lab. Each day will cover one of four topics: kinematics and applied mechanics (Newton’s laws, momentum, energy). The last two days will be a final project. For the final project, the girls can choose which topic they loved learning about the most, research the implications of the topic in engineering, and design an experiment or apparatus that shows an understanding of that topic. They’ll get the opportunity to show off their projects to their peers in a final, grand showcase.