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Engineers in Training 2003
Shodor > SUCCEED > Workshops > Archive > Engineers in Training 2003

The class began with the students finishing the contest (see day two) that they didn't finish the day before. The winning team's structure held 96 marbles.

After the contest was finished, Garrett talked about optimization. The students played a game where each student wrote the number of M&Ms they wanted on a piece of paper. If the number they picked matched a number another student wrote, both students got two M&Ms. The best was 14 M&Ms in the first round. During the second round, students were allowed to communicate with each other. The greatest amount of M&Ms earned was, again, 14. A third round was held where each of the 11 students had to pick a number between one and ten. Garrett lectured the students on how they could communicate more clearly by setting standards of weight, length, time, and temperature.

After snack, each student cut a certain amount of squares out of the corners of a piece of graphing paper. This allowed the sides to be folded up and meet to form a box. Then, Garrett poured sand into each box and weighed them. The box that held the most had the dimensions 3.5 x 12 x 18. Students then plotted the mass and volume of each box on a graphing applet. They had to find a formula that plotted a line that ran through all the points.They ran out of time before the activity could be finished, so Garrett decided to continue the activity the next day.