Helianthus: Engineering in Your Hands

 

ENGINEERING IN YOUR HANDS

 This High School is not just all about exams, presentations or homeworks. 

One of the best thing of this High School is that we also do projects and competitions that make students more excited. This High School helps us activate our full capacity and helps us discover new things. This year we had the privilege to be part of a competition called "Engineering in your hands".

Their challenge for us this year is called “HELIANTHUS. Pointing at the SUN” by building a solar tracker that finds where the sun is and orients a panel toward it. The teacher asked for five students to participate in the competition. 

 Cristina, Marcel, Aiwei, Marjorie and I (Jiellian) volunteered to be part of it. The five of us like things associated with engineering, that is why we grabbed this opportunity. 

The proposal they gave will allow us develop an engineering project throughout the competition, from the planning and design phase to construction and operation. We also went to a conference where they gave us an introduction about this competition and we also did some activities there. It was so fun and we had a great time. That conference pushed us to be more excited but to be honest also a little bit nervous because there were so many people there. 

The competition consists of six deliveries with different challenges, each one with their own difficulty level. The first challenge is to make a plan for us to know the tasks we are in charge of and to know when do we have to send the next tasks in order for us to be organise.

Then we made a video where we were presenting ourselves, saying why we do we like engineering and the tasks distributed. In this phase we had four stars over four. The second challenge consists of thinking about how we will build our helianthus so that it points at the sun and captures the greatest amount of energy possible. 

To do this we will have to make a detailed design plans in pdf format and an explanation, in our own words, of the design. We did an excel file with a list of all the components and materials we need. In this phase we also got four stars over four. The third challenge we did is to start building the solar tracker. We divided the group into two. 

We did the movement of the solar panel. While Marcel, Marjorie and I (Jiellian) were doing the construction. It was so stressful for the group because we had to change many things at the last moment because things were not going as we planned. We thought we were not able to make the solar panel move at time and we would be out of the competition. But, with the help of each one, we did it. 

Then we made a video of the construction and how it moves. We also sent six pictures of the construction we made. They did not send us the score yet but hopefully it was good enough to pass to the next phase. 

There are two more phases but we have not gotten there yet so hopefully we will win this competition. By far it is really good and we are enjoying what we are doing. 

What we learned so far is that we cannot do things on our own but we need the help of each one. We created such a great bond with each other. Truly that it is not really important if we win or loose but the lessons we learned throughout the process and specially the people we get to know throughout the way. 

or loose I do not regret joining this competition!

Jiellian Bach 1º