Today's workshop's purpose was twofold - to introduce students to the concept of questioning the information given in any situation, and to give them a primer on general engineering concepts and applications. We began with the question of "what is a computer?", which evoked a variety of answers. The most important concept was that computers are a tool and nothing more: they do exactly what we tell them, which can be their greatest strength and greatest weakness. Next the instructor spoke to the human strength of pattern recognition, citing exercises such as those found on shodor.org/talks/ncsi in order to demonstrate the superiority of the human mind.
The instructor then talked about conventions such as order of operations, which were set to ensure that results were consistent between people. They also demonstrated that just because a rule holds for any particular example (in math, a method for simplifying fractions, for instance) does not mean is is usable in other situations.
Next was the concept of context-sensitive computing, demonstrated by Google's ability to return answers in the form (roman numerals, words) the math problem was asked in. It was brought to the students' attention that when asked for the "mass of Pluto", Google automatically returned results related to the (dwarf) planet, not, say, the cartoon dog.
The instructor moved from there to the discrepancies often found between what people are told and reality. Examining several rulers and yardsticks, for instance, revealed that an inch was not actually exactly the same between different measurement devices. The students were then asked to figure out how to carry a certain amount of boiling radium (Ra) across a room. This involved finding a material with a higher melting point than Radium's boiling point. A reliable source for Radium's boiling point, however, is not easily found online - in fact, many of the sources online reference only themselves. This demonstrated that Google was not, in fact, able to do anything: sometimes we humans have to figure things out for ourselves via experiment.
The students also had the opportunity to build a battery of sorts, experimenting with various combinations of several different metals and saltwater-soaked paper towels, measuring the current of each.
The rest of the class involved the instructor talking about specific applications of the concepts we'd learned, such as planning what sort of brake pads to put on a car, or what type of metals to use in a battery to achieve a desired voltage for a device.