Everyday Engineering
Explore engineering challenges with these fun and easy STEM at home activities you can do with items found around your house.
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Try your hand at a variety of STEM activities developed for our award-winning documentary Dream Big: Engineering Our World.
Dig deeper
Dream Big: Engineering Our World: Take a journey of discovery from the world’s tallest building to a bridge higher than the clouds and witness how today’s engineers are shaping the world of tomorrow. (42 minutes, available on Netflix and Vimeo).
Earthquakes
- Meet Geotechnical Engineer Menzer Pehlivan: Inspired by living through an earthquake, this engineer in Nepal explores how the stability of soil keeps buildings standing.
- Dream Big - Meet the Women Engineers: Menzer Pehlivan, Avery Bang, and Anjelica Hernandez share their experiences as female engineers.
Solar
- Philippines: Plastic Bottles Go Solar. See what a difference daylight can make for this building in the Philippines.
- Dream Big - Lean and Green: Engineering Alternative Energy. Learn how engineers are looking for ways to use renewable energy sources such as sun and wind.
Water
- Dream Big - Quenching A Thirsty World: Water Engineering. Watch how engineers are finding innovative ways to provide clean water.
- Dream Big - Water Wishes: Engineering for Those in Need. See how college students are bringing clean water to a village in Peru.
- Historic water treatment sites:
- The Lawrence Experimental Station. A pioneer engineering laboratory for research on the treatment of water supply, sewage and industrial waste.
- The Metropolitan Milwaukee Sewage Treatment Plant. America's earliest large-scale activated sludge type municipal sewage treatment plant.
- Water treatment pioneers:
- Ellen Henrietta Swallow Richards. The first woman to graduate from MIT, a trailblazer in sanitary engineering and public health, and the founder of home economics.
- Abel Wolman. Wolman combined engineering with public health and hygiene into the field that came to be known as sanitary engineering.
Wind
- Dream Big - Holding Sway: Wind Engineering - See how engineers used wind testing to build the Shanghai Tower, one of the tallest buildings in the world.
- Alexandre Gustave Eiffel - designer of the Eiffel Tower and engineer behind some of the first wind tunnels.
- The Boundary Layer Wind Tunnel Laboratory (PDF) -This ASCE Historic Landmark was the first wind tunnel built explicitly to test the effects of wind on the built environment.