Organized competitions remain a great way to inspire the fledgling engineer. When they take place at the scholastic level, these competitions are able to show students that STEM education can be fun, and that a career in engineering is a goal worth striving for by both boys and girls.

The Mindstorms Challenge, a Lego Robotics Competition

Recently the 13th annual Mindstorms Challenge, a robotics competition featuring Lego toys, took place at Wichita State University. In addition to encouraging students to study their STEM subjects, the competition is also charged with promoting the principles of collaboration and teamwork. Those latter skills become highly important when engaged in an engineering career.

The students taking place in Mindstorms found that while building the Lego robots didn’t take too much time, programming the plastic devices involved a significant amount of effort. This year’s competition featured 31 different teams.

Wichita State’s School of Engineering sponsored the competition in collaboration with Spirit AeroSystems. “Kids come here [and] learn about some math principles that actually has application,” said WSU Professor Larry Whitman. Hopefully, today’s Lego robotic engineers will become tomorrow’s mechanical engineers.

Imagination Station Competition part of National Engineers Week

Another competition for students took place as part of National Engineers Week. This event, held at Toledo’s Imagination Station, involved the children designing and building towers made up of only old newspapers and masking tape. These structures needed to be able to hold the weight of a baseball while “towering” to the height of at least 18 inches.

Anna Kolin, Imagination Station spokesman, said the competition intended to teach children the principles of iterative design, construction, and testing. Each tower had to be able to stand while holding the baseball and standing up to the stress caused by a high-powered fan.

If you can remember fondly on the days when you first decided to be an engineer, these stories of youngsters dipping their toes into the engineering science water must inspire.

If you’d like to further your own engineering career, be sure to talk to the people at The Talley Group, one of the leading staffing companies in the industry. Their helpful recruiters can make sure your career stands up to the stresses of today’s market.

Those of you looking for a robust mechanical engineering app for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch need to check out Mechanical Engineer available at the App Store from MultiEducator. Covered in passing in a previous post here at The Talley Group, let’s take a more detailed look at this excellent app for the mechanical engineer or the engineering student.

Mechanical Engineer is laden with formulas and features sure to inform and inspire engineers. Since it is a universal app, one download contains versions optimized for the screen size of every iPhone and iPad model, as well as the iPod Touch.

MultiEducator Mechanical Engineer Features

• 300 important mechanical engineering formulas
• 300 conversion formulas
• 70 area formulas
• Universal app compatible with the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch
• Saving of customized formulas
• Email formula results
• Available for $5.99 at the App Store

MultiEducator provides excellent support for the app, which is part of their Formulator line of mobile engineering software. The company actually takes suggestions on the inclusion of new formulas to be included in future versions.

Mechanical Engineer Formulas and Functionality

Mechanical Engineer arranges its nearly 700 formulas in a wide array of categories that spans the overall mechanical engineering world. A sampling of these categories includes some specific to transportation: Brakes, Vehicle Drives, and Clutches, while others cover topics like Fluid Power, Internal Combustion, Refrigeration, and Metalworking. These categories make it easy to find a particular formula, and the app also keeps track of those that are frequently accessed.

The app’s interface is functional, especially on the larger screen real estate of the iPad, with a useful pop-up calculator to enter formula values. The faux leather and paper graphic backgrounds add to the overall feel. The inclusion of area formulas and metric conversions provide convenience.

An app like Mechanical Engineer is great for engineering students and those already in a productive career. Students looking for their first mechanical engineering job, as well as experienced engineers on a quest for a new challenge, need to talk with the engineering recruiters at The Talley Group. As one of the leading engineering staffing companies in the United States, they can help you find a perfect mechanical engineering position so you can try out MultiEducator’s app while actually on the job.