Budding engineers help the homeless

THE NEXT TIME A TELEVISION CAMERA PANS ACROSS the depressing brown terrain of a natural disaster or war-tom zone, look for pink. As in "Pink Haven," a new type of emergency shelter designed by a group of high-school students from Simsbury, Connecticut. Their prototype won first prize this year in a national competition asking students to solve a societal problem through a novel engineering design, construction, and marketing. The Simsbury team hopes to one day see its pink temporary buildings used to house the millions around the world left homeless each year by floods, earthquakes, and other disasters.

In an annual design contest sponsored by the Junior Engineering Technical Society (JETS), Inc.-- an educational organization that promotes interest in high-school engineering, science, and math-- the assignment was to build emergency housing that is portable and affordable, easily constructed, and weather resistant.

Starting in September, about 100 schools assembled teams and sent them scrambling to brainstorm, build models, sew, glue, and rivet to come up with a unique and practical product. Past competitions have challenged students to come up with safer shopping carts, a device to assist the elderly in getting up from a chair, and page turners for disabled readers. At least one year's winning design is in the process of being patented.

"When you ask students what they learned from the competition, they often say 'I'm learning to work with other people and solve problems.' That is what engineering is about, and we're trying to make that connection," says JETS executive director Mike Peralta.

At Simsbury High, a group of students in grades 9 through 12 jumped into the competition enthusiastically with 30-year-old Bob Avery, a science teacher at the school. "The hardest part was the brainstorming,' says Avery. "You have 20 kids, 19 ideas, and everybody loves their own idea best."

With a deadline of January to beat, the group met after school and surfed the Internet, visited the library, and cruised the aisles of home improvement stores for ideas. A toothpick model and the beginnings of a prototype took shape in the basement of junior Mike Beilstein. "They were eating us out of house and home," says Beilstein.

In an attempt to get away from conventional tent designs, they came up with a geodesic dome-15 triangles of aluminum rods connected by brass hinges. When the rods drooped like "wet spaghetti," the team found aluminum screen-door jambs at Home Depot and cut them to fit.

Beilstein's mother, a quitter, had sewing machines set up on the kitchen table and the students took turns feeding yards of pink nylon, the only color they could find in the right weight, through the needles. Just a week away from the deadline, Mike checked on the assembled unit one morning and was devastated to see it had collapsed completely, its riveted brass hinges popped open from repeated foldings and unfoldings.

Beilstein's mom happened to bring home flexible silicon tubing from the plumbing store, and one of the team absentmindedly sleeved an aluminum rod into the tube. Voila, instant connectors for the triangles, and a shelter for six, withstanding more than 700 lbs. of weight, impervious to the elements.

Realizing that their product now had to be sold to the judges, junior Nick Fahey pushed hard for a music-based presentation. As slides of world disasters flashed on a projection screen, Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata set the tone for a winning entry. Why pink, they were asked. In a marketing stroke of genius, the team pointed out the increased visibility for searching helicopters and the possibility of brightening the surroundings of those in need. For their efforts, the Simsbury group won, in addition to plaudits, a May outing to Disneyworld.

The challenge for this year's competition is broader than last year's-design and fabricate a product that will help make life easier for a person whose body does not function properly. "Imagination to prototype,' says Peralta. The thing that engineers do best.

Linda Creighton is a freelance writer living in Arlington, Va.

Copyright American Society for Engineering Education Sep 2000
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