By Amy Martens, P.E.

I was fortunate to have the opportunity during national Engineer’s Week this past February to educate our youth about Industrial Engineering. I was asked by the Kansas Children’s Discovery Center in Topeka, KS to participate in an Engineering Expo to provide our youth with exciting and interactive engineering experiments. This was the first time the recently opened facility has held this event and they have the desire to make it an annual occurrence.

Several organizations and engineering disciplines were represented at the event:

• Westar Energy: Electrical Engineering
• Kansas Department of Transportation: Civil Engineering
• Kansas State University: Civil Engineering
• Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas: Industrial Engineering

The engineering displays were enjoyable to the both the children and adults who participated in the event. The civil engineering displays shared knowledge about water quality,  treatment and buoyancy; the electrical engineering display showed the energy savings tied to using LED technology; and the industrial engineering display provided a demonstration of unit production as compared to assembly line production using Legos.

It was exciting to me to share the passion I have for engineering with our youth. This type of volunteerism is something that I highly recommend to any engineer. If you have any interest in assisting with this event next year, please contact me at amy.martens@bcbsks.com. The representatives at the Kansas Children’s Discovery Center would like to grow this event next year, so it would be great if I could interest volunteers who could represent Industrial Engineering from other organizations.

More info on the Kansas Children’s Discovery Center – http://www.kansasdiscovery.org/