Who am I?What is Project Lead The Way (PLTW)? |
My name is Ryan Curley, I attend school at South Western Senior High School in Hanover Pennsylvania. I am a part of the class of 2022, participate in year round sports ( Football, Wrestling, and Track and Field), and have Volunteered for On The Edge Children's Foundation.
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Project Lead The Way is a STEM based course, meaning that its topics heavily surround the idea of idea of science, technology, engineering, and math. The course is targeted to students ranging from Pre K all the way up to 12th grade in hopes that they learn real world skills and practices that will help them flourish in their careers. One of the six programs in PLTW is engineering, The second lesson in this program is Intro to Engineering and Design (IED), It comes after Engineering Essentials. IED focuses on the design aspect of engineering, teaching us how to turn sketches and measurements into working 3D printed designs with the intention of being accurate to our design input. This course also teaches students how to work and communicate with one another through group projects where teammates must share written design plans, ideas, criterias, and sketches with each other in order to get the best ideas out of one another (hopefully creating the best final product from these interactions). Our main tools given to us throughout this lesson are our Computer Aided Drafting program (CAD), our notebooks, and our dialed calipers that can help us estimate the measurement of an object down to the thousandths of an inch.
What Is the Design Process?The Design Process is a tool used by engineers that helps them establish and justify their product. First, the engineer must define the problem as all engineers no matter Chemical, Civil, Mechanical, Industrial, or electrical, are all problem solvers at their roots. Once their problem is identified they can move onto the second step of the design process where they generate ideas or concepts that could be used to possibly solve their problem (note: during the first cycle of the design process this step does not include refining/slimming out the looks of the design as its primary focus is to create a working solution/prototype that will be alter/improved in future iterations). Once a concept is chosen, we can move on to building and testing the prototype of our product where we can gather notes on its successes and limitations, helping us gather data and evaluate our prototype results and present them to our audience/consumers with the hopes of getting positive feedback. This cycle then repeats form the beginning and continues to repeat over and over in hopes of producing a improved design each time.
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