There are few schools in the United States that have the money to have something like this. It’s fun to imagine how much all of the industrial-grade equipment beeping in the back of the room, the dozens of mid-range laptops on which students click on, and all of the materials required to build machines and robots must have cost to get into the school. This is Engineering Club. Any student is welcome to hang out every Friday after school in room 167 at East Leyden. Students can use 3D printers, play around with the CAD (Computer-Aided Design) software on the laptops running Windows, program robots, and the list goes on. The club is sponsored by Mr. Brian Burcham, who also teaches in the Industrial Tech Department at East.
As he put it, “Engineering Club is a place where you can explore all the branches of engineering, any interests that you might have that are similar to engineering. Engineers design, build and create things. And so we do a lot of electronics and robotics, 3D printing, [and] a little bit of anything that has to do with designing and creating stuff.”
While some students just like to hang out with their friends in the club, others actually take it upon themselves to use the tools surrounding them and try building something great. Konrad Kaplan, a senior at West Leyden, frequently stops by the engineering room after school on Fridays to see what’s going on in Mr. Burcham’s club. Right now, Konrad is trying to “build a robot, and I’m trying to use some machines at home to build stuff. I want to play around with it, see what else I can do.”
A lot of other students have also tried programming a robot through Engineering Club with various goals and functions for them. The robotics team (also sponsored by Mr. Burcham) is trying to build a battlebot for the Robot Rumble competitions near the end of the school year, while other students either build one for fun or to learn about the engineering process and how different components can be used together to make something entirely new. However, what motivated them to want to start learning engineering and design to begin with?
In Konrad’s case, he was simply inspired by seeing other robots on the internet or made by other students, and was fascinated by how they work and what you can do with them. For Mr. Burcham, it was something completely different, “My mom was a computer programmer, and my dad was a chemist and an electrician, and so I kind of grew up just being able to do whatever I wanted. I didn’t do well in school because I was always fidgeting and making and building things, and it wasn’t until the teacher let me bring some of the robots that I was making, or my chemistry set to school, or then I realized that I could actually do well in school.”
Mr. Burcham then goes on to describe what he did after he realized this, “And so I started out in a career, and then wound up leaving that because I would volunteer at the schools, and I would help students learn how to read who weren’t motivated to read. What I wound up doing is buying a little model engine, and then had that student read assembly instructions to me as they put it together. And so I realized, well, this is kind of a thing that’s missing in schools, is making, building, [and] fixing. A student who instructors didn’t think could read was a very good reader, just not motivated. So I dropped that career that I was in and went back to school to get my education degree and started teaching Industrial Tech, [involving] engineering and robotics, electronics, computer aided design, home repair, manufacturing, architecture, anything about reading, but [actually] doing stuff that reading gravitated towards.”
Inspiration can come from anywhere for you to do anything, whether that be how much money and resources the school has at your disposal, the realization that the engineering process can be applied to anything to engage students, or simply seeing other people make cool stuff. Come join Engineering Club, every Friday after school in room 167 at East Leyden.
