Day 11: Falling Eggs, More Tanlines, Hoops, and One Twos

Hello Mesquiters, hope your Friday was as fun as ours!! :)

Tower of Spaghetti Winners!

Today startd off with breakfast at an earlier start with Don Javier and Luce kindly serving us fruit and delicious egg sandwhiches (with avocados, yum!) for our ride up to the primary school directed by Don Plutarco (Check out Day 8 to learn more about the extrodinary entrepreneur). We were welcomed with a beautiful horizon of the mountains and clouds stretching in the distance, along with kids having outdoor lessons. The school overlooks the valley of Suchil providing excellent integration of community and environmental needs into the students learning curriculum. We were introuducted to the Director of the middle school and the sixth grade teacher of the students we would be working with and then began our Engineering Workshop with the students. Hannah Ilan did an excellent job in prepping the workshop with Ashlen (TA’s social work intern), ensuring that we could best communicate engineering to 12 year olds and provide creative and engaging activities for them. Our first activity entailed working with small groups of 3 and building THE tallest tower of spaghetti all while demonstrating the importance of creativity, flexibility, communication, and openness to new ideas (must needed skills in engineering)! Each of us team members were able to facilitate each group and promote each of these skills. It was a lot of fun seeing the wheels turn in the brainstorming phase and then watching them integrate triangles into their tower for better support (Fun fact: triangles are the most structurally sound shape). The second activity was called the “Falling Egg”. To expand on the four skills, the students were broken up into 3 groups and were tasked to prevent a falling egg from breaking as it fell from David’s outstretched hand (our tall technical advisor) to the floor. With limited materials, more concept generation, and team work 2 out of the 3 groups were able to keep the egg from breaking at floor contact. Through all of this, Gaby did an amazing job at translating/communicating ideas for each activity and believe that with her engineering and Hannah Ilan’s prep, Archik, Ryan and myself were able to engage with the students as well with our engineering expertise with relatively good spanish.

After saying goodbye to the kids and the mountainess view, we headed back to our worksite and got back to working on our project. Team Base anchored the PSD down, silconed sides of the panels, and further worked on the support system of the structure (internal supports will be placed inside). Team Wood completed another rack and have everything cut for the final rack and trays. After lunch, we finished up our concept generation of our pulley design and plan to work with Guerro (the handy contractor for the mesquite team). These sentences are very hot overviews of what our work day consisted of, almost as hot as our PSD @ 120F!!! Overall, good work day.

We finished up our fun day with some pick up basketball with Antonio and Petri, along with a pick up game of futbol! Playing hoops with them was a fun way to hang with them outside of work. And although we might’ve lost in the futbol game, Ryan, Archik, and I had a blast playing with the Suchil kids and getting some foot work in. We had a fantastic fan base with Hannah Ilan, Gaby, and Antonio eating lime popsicles and Petri and Minerava being soccer moms in conversation with one another.

It was a long fun work day and I am so glad to be sharing these memories with these longhorns and mesquite team. We’ve been together a week and man has it been one of my favorite weeks of senior year. Stay tuned for our final days in Suchil and on our project with the team.

Peace, love, tan lines,

- Hannah Myers y Team Mexico

P.S. I scored the final goal in our futbol game as a header :)))