Engineering Week 2005
Eggs were Dropping and Benson Hall was Popping!
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The last weekend in April, Benson Hall was popping! Over 7,000 students came to the University of Washington Engineering Open House, and at least 5,000 of them must have come to chemical engineering. That is, of course, because our exhibits are the most fun! Students just love the liquid nitrogen ice cream, silly putty, the egg drop, and the challenge to remove water from a bottle in the shortest time. We had some new exhibits this year – a soda bottle motorboat race and a boat powered by a fuel cell. The latter ran in Drumheller Fountain, although it ran out of hydrogen pretty quickly. That may have a lesson for us as we consider cars powered by fuel cells! The centennial posters showing products made by chemical engineers were displayed again, and we shared our space with Paper Science who demonstrated de-inking of wastepaper. We did have some scientific exhibits, too: enginearrings and organic light-emitting diodes. Before you could get your titanium-coated earrings, you had to listen to the lecture about the underlying science. That exhibit was crowded, showing that if your exhibit is good enough, people will listen!
Montine Swikert was in charge, and she had enlisted, cajoled, and bribed students to help. The open house began at 9 a.m. (but Prof. Finlayson thought it was 10), but it didn’t matter. There was a P-chem test at 9:30, so no one was available to run the exhibits anyway. Fortunately, only a dozen people came before 10:30, at which time the juniors were able to populate the exhibits. Both juniors and seniors pitched in and worked longer than they had agreed to, since we were short-handed, and a few made additional runs to the stores to supplement the supplies. Participants were rewarded with pizza lunches and T-shirts. Prof. Finlayson was especially proud of the students at the end of the day—everyone stayed to clean up (5,000 kids do make a mess!). Saturday the clean up was postponed for a few minutes while chemical engineering students tried to throw uncooked eggs 50 feet and catch them without cracking them. Hmm . . . In the end the “porch” was as clean as it is any time during the year.
