Engineer's Visit

On Thursday the twelfth of February, an engineer came into St. Corban's to talk to the 6th classes about what it is like to be an engineer and what engineers do. He introduced himself as Michael Regan and went on to show us a picture of a house on the whiteboard. He asked us if there was any problems with the house. A lot of the lads agreed that the foundations didn’t look steady. Michael said that this was correct and showed us a representation of the house. A brick  represented the house and there was a sponge underneath the brick to represent soft ground. Underneath the sponge was the teacher’s desk, which represented the hard ground. He showed us that when the heavy brick was placed on top of the soft sponge, the sponge sagged but the table didn’t react. This is what would happen if a house was built like the plans he had shown us. Then he went on to stick a couple of pencils into the sponge and placed the brick back on top. This time the sponge didn’t sag. This is because the pencils were transferring the weight of the brick to the desk. He explained to us that this is what the foundations of a building look like (in a simple form). That was only one of the projects in a very fun talk that I think all the boys enjoyed very much. Everyone was extremely engrossed in the talk and had a good time. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that in 10 years some of the pupils have gone on to become engineers.

Article by David C., St. Corban's Media Team.