Articles

TEAMS — A Taste of Real World Engineering

By Stephanie Zhang

Some science competitions ask you to know everything: What is the pH when you mix .7 liters of acetic acid with .2 liters of sodium hydroxide solution? Which scientist discovered cells by looking at a slice of cork under his microscope? What is the acceleration of this planet, around this star, under this gravitational field, at apogee? <

But TEAMS (Tests of Engineering Aptitude, Mathematics, and Science)has a different aim. Facts are not the issue here. Textbooks are welcome —you could cart in the school library if you really felt it would help you. But they’re not really necessary since formulas come straight off the test page, given to you along with the problems. What TEAMS really tests is your ability to apply all these different facts and formulas to real engineering questions. This not only focuses the contest on students ’ logic and problem-solving skills, but also provides students with many examples of the importance of engineering to everyday human life.

Like real-world engineering, TEAMS also requires serious cooperation among team members to get anything done. The first part of the test consists of 100 multiple-choice questions, divided into ten sections on different subjects, that must be completed in 90 minutes. Our team started by dividing the work:“Welding sounds easy —can a sophomore please take this section?” “Can a physics student take the Roadway Design section?”

After the frenzy, I ended up with the Cheese-Making Process section —probably not the best use of resources, I realized. An hour into the contest, the sophomore sitting next to me discovered that her section included calculus. Although I know calculus, I was unable to help; doing any part of a section involves reading all the background information, and doing the 10th problem involves having intimate knowledge of the first nine.

Completing 10 multiple-choice questions within an hour and a half may not seem like that big a deal. However, they are interspersed among a veritable avalanche of instructions, background information, charts, tables, diagrams, equations, formula sheets, and the like. Moreover, the material is mostly new; few high school students have ever studied the intricacies of welding, for example. Then there are the more usual problems, such as “getting stuck. ” All of this contributes to a general sense of urgency. The last five minutes of the session are filled with people deciding on answers, checking other people ’s work, demanding that others hurry up, and making guesses on any unsolved problems. Although exhilarating, the experience is also highly stressful: upon these scores for the first section rest your state rankings.

The second 90-minute section of the day involves answering several problems based on five of the 10 topics that appeared in the first section. There is no guesswork here, as teams must subsequently support each of their answers.

Still, there are similarities to the morning session, the most important being an emphasis upon cooperation. And the work in this section determines national rankings.

Our team reassigned people to topics they worked on in the morning or to other areas of expertise. For example, the biology student who had already done the Coastal Hazard Mitigation section worked on that, while a fellow junior who was very interested in cars knew the complete answer to almost every question in the Hybrid-Electric Vehicle section. I was responsible for the Spin Ejection Mechanism section. After 10 minutes, I realized that I would never make enough headway, so I switched places with a teammate who had worked on this topic in the first section, and took over his place with the Satellite in Orbit section. It involved complicated physics that I was unused to, but discussion with my group and some basic logic allowed me to complete my problems in time, and my friend was able to finish his work on the Spin Ejection Mechanism section.

All the cooperation and hard work paid off. My team, listed as the school ’s B team, ranked 19th in our division, above the A team, which ranked 22nd. We had an exciting new experience where we could meet with other students with similar interests, and we discovered in ourselves an ability to conquer material beyond normal course-work. Moreover, it was a wonderful opportunity to discover engineering as an area of study intrinsically connected to real-life problems and focused on teamwork and cooperation.

This article originally appeared in Imagine: Opportunities and Resources for Academically Talented Youth (vol. 11 no. 3) and is reprinted here with permission.

Stephanie Zhang was a senior at New Brunswick High School in New Jersey when she wrote the article. She captained the math team and was a member of the science team and French Club. Stephanie also volunteered at a local senior center.