Engineering Shorts
Through the course of the school year I like to do what I call "engineering shorts." These are short (1/2 to 1 period long) problem solving/engineering exercises similar to training exercises done in industry for team-building, efficiency, and problem solving sessions. I like to do these with both my physics and engineering classes for these same reasons. The engineering shorts can be used to help teach certain concepts or they can be very integrated allowing for many ideas to be touched on by the activity, such as: problem solving, communicating, leadership, time budgeting, financial budgeting and more. There are a few really good engineering shorts that I have come across, one of which is the the Kaizen Bridge activitiy. Kaizen means "continuous improvement," and businesses use these activities to improve and streamline production. I had the husband of one of my colleagues come and present this activity to my engineering class, and they loved it. He had a modified version of one I had seen before, but it was just as good. You can see a similar activities online at the URL: