DECEMBER: living with authority

Main Points of Class

Authority is a necessary and good aspect of life; you need to learn to deal with it properly or you will miss out on many very good opportunities.
When your parents (teachers, etc.) exercise authority over you, they do so for your own good.
The more your parents see that you have mature judgment, the fewer restrictions they will place on you. Authority helps us internalize and later exercise on our own the kind of criteria that will make us happy.

In-class activity: The Egg Drop Challenge

This activity challenges students to design and build a structure that protects a raw egg from a high fall, using only a fixed set of everyday materials. It is meant to give students a taste of the engineering design process — brainstorming, justifying a plan, building under constraints, and learning from a real-world test where the result is impossible to fake.
Students will learn how to think through a problem before acting on it: to plan and justify a design, to work within firm material and size constraints, and to be able to explain to others why a solution should work before it is put to the test.