This year Project Lead The Way has been so fun! I love the new makerspace, I feel right at home, the new furniture is just so comfortable. I also love the whole set up of the class I really enjoy how everything is online and we get to have a lot of free will. we get to just come to class and get started on what we need to, we don’t have to sit and a listen to a teacher ramble on forever about instructions.

This past two weeks I completed the Engineering module, it was so fun and interesting. I really enjoyed making our bridge and testing it. After completing this module I feel very proud of our final product no matter how much weight it held. I have been interested in careers in the engineering pathway for a while now, and I feel this module just solidified my interest. I think that working in the engineering field would have it ups and down like any other job, but it would be very exciting to go to work everyday and solve problems.

I think solving problems was a big theme in this module, I know my group and I came across a couple of situations where we had to step back and rethink what we were doing. For example one day when we came to class the bridge we had started building had completely disappeared and we had to restart the entire thing. As you would guess this was pretty frustrating but we had to just stop take a breath and get back to work. Even though I was extremely annoyed, believe it or not it also taught me a lesson. It showed me what being an engineer is really like. You are not always going to succeed the first time, you have to keep trying until something works.

In the end even though the final product of our bridge may have not been exactly what we had imagined, I know I am proud of the hard work we put into it. Building a bridge out of toothpicks and Elmer’s glue is not the easiest task in the world.

– Macy Nelms