First Engineering Night at Watsessing School is a success

BLOOMFIELD, NJ — A mother of two children attending Watsessing Elementary School, and the media specialist there, recently created the first Engineering Night at the school.

The event was held Thursday, Feb. 11, in the gymnasium. It was planned to commemorate the Feb. 21 to 27 observance of National Engineering Week, which focuses scholastic attention on engineering careers. Fifty-four children signed up for Engineering Night, according to Kelly Krick, the media specialist, and about 40 children attended. Krick, whose husband is an electrical engineer, and Sonya Rosario, the Watsessing School mother who co-created the event with Krick, had spoken last year about a night of engineering.

To Rosario, engineering and children are a perfect combination.
“Since my children are very interested in science and building, like other children, I thought it would be a great event,” she said in a telephone interview earlier this week.

Science and engineering come to life when it is hands-on, she said, and elementary school children are at the right age to be exposed to it.

Five engineers, three men and two women, agreed to provide the hands-on experience at Engineering Night. These were environmental, civil, mechanical/energy, industrial, and mechanical/aerospace engineers. Michael Warholak, the robotics advisor at Bloomfield High School, was also contacted. Warholak came with five BHS students and a robot.

There were a number of activities for various engineering feats.
For a hands-on industrial engineering activity, lip gloss, using Vaseline or gelatin, was produced. Water purification was the result of environmental engineering. A bridge made of plastic straws was an example of civil engineering and the speed of an object rolling down an inclined plane helped explain mechanical engineering.

Some of the children interested in the engineering experience were part of the Scratch Club, a group of about 15 fourth-, fifth- and sixth-graders who meet, with Krick, during lunch period over the course of several marking periods. Recently, Scratch Club members made public service announcements warning of the perils of not looking both ways when crossing the street.

Krick said Warholak and the BHS Robotics Club whetted the engineering appetite of the Watsessing children, although a similar club at the elementary school is still some time away. But with the donation of Lego parts, and a small grant from the Bloomfield Educational Foundation for the purchase of Little Bits, a Lego-type building activity, Krick thinks the children will get an introduction to robots.

“Robotics brings science to life,” she said last week in the school media room.
Rosario is of the same mind.

“Maybe the children don’t realize it is engineering,” she said, “but building with Legos is engineering. They don’t always see it come to life but they have the concepts.”

The first Engineering Night was a great success, Rosario said, and she wants it to continue at Watsessing or even throughout the Bloomfield school district. Krick was already thinking about Watsessing Engineering Night 2017 and what the success last week had taught her.

“Next year, the activities should be more spread out,” she said. “They were too close this year. We need more groups, more engineers, and more hands-on for the kids.”