HOUSTON – You can use cards and pennies to play poker, for instance, or you can use them to construct a tower and inspire future engineers.
“Try to make the best and the tallest," says Adrian Pina.
Adrian is in seventh grade at KIPP Intrepid Preparatory School in Houston. Adrian said he doesn't want to be a rock star or pro athlete when he grows up - he wants to be an engineer. Today he's experiencing what it takes.
“It's really cool because we get to learn how engineers work and how they think,” says Adrian.
“We share with them different aspects of engineering and let them actually try it out,” says Joseph Perea.
Perea is here with 70 of his ExxonMobil colleagues for "engineering day."
“We have about 10 different projects. We have things like egg drop, we have things like a marshmallow catapult, we have them build a house of cards and then determine how much weight it's able to hold, the resistance of it; we also build towers using pipe cleaners and straws,” Perea says.
Each of the projects is designed not only to teach engineering principles, but to inspire students who may have never thought about this kind of career.
“For under-represented minorities, there's very few that actually choose a science, technology, engineering or math career field,” Perea says.
“Even though they hear the term engineering, when ExxonMobil comes they get to meet a lot of people who represent their background, their culture. It's in that moment where they get to look at somebody and say 'wow, this is an opportunity that I can see myself in,'” KIPP fifth-grade science teacher Charlysse Graham says. “It has to start here. When we wait until they're in 10th and 11th grade, it's too late.”