Stemming from a trio of students with a passion for engineering, one of RM’s newest clubs hopes to make a sizable impact on the community through engineering and design. While it has had an unusual start (they only recently had their first meeting), RM engineering seeks to combine creativity and engineering to make a difference in the community and help RM students find their passion for the discipline.
From planning to designing to building, the new club allows RM students to go through all the steps college-level engineering students go through, but at the high school level. Allowing students to have these opportunities in high school is precisely the reason the leaders founded RM Engineering.
“If you look at [college] websites, engineering students are actively building projects and real stuff. So we want to do this on a high school level of course,” junior Adam Dubelman, co-president of the club, said.
The club, which is still solidifying its funds from a grant, started small with its first meeting. They directed all members to brainstorm ideas for a “Rube Goldberg Machine,” which is a classic test of both creativity and engineering prowess.
“The official definition of a Rube Goldberg Machine is a machine with a complicated series of steps with no specific important goal in mind…The point isn’t to do something important, rather [to] enjoy the process of designing it,” junior Said Salchak, the club’s vice president, said.
The meetings, which are every Tuesday in room 357, allow students to go through the engineering and design process over a series of weeks. In the following weeks, the club will reconvene to bring their ideas together for the machine, but soon, the club’s leadership hopes to design and build more than just “meaningless” mechanisms.
“Making an engineering club to get exposure to high school students was our main motive, and then paired with that making a beneficial impact in the community… that’s something we can do through engineering,” junior Sanya Bharti, co-president of the Engineering Club, said.
While there are a plethora of different ways the club could use Engineering to benefit the community, the leaders had a rather specific idea in mind. “Our primary goal is to create an automatic irrigation system that can collect rainwater and then distribute it according to what the plants need, or what the area would need, like soil/moisture levels, humidity, that sort of thing. And, that way we could have a community garden or water empty lots and create greenspaces in communities to help to enrich those people’s lives and help it look nicer,” Salchak said.
The incentive of making a difference in the community is a benefit of joining RM engineering. As the club works on the project they also hope to hold meetings after school on Thursdays, in the tech room.
“It’s fun to build new things, make a process, and go through the journey of designing something that actually has an impact,” Bharti said. RM engineering is perfect for engineering lovers and anyone interested in learning more about the topic in general.
“If you are interested in engineering or as a potential career path, and you wanna see whether or not you like it, how it sort of works, sorta get some experience, our club is a perfect place to do that,” Dubleman said.
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