For Mario Lawandy, of Woodrow Wilson School, coming to engineering day in Bayonne, was keeping a promise he made to his father.
“My dad wanted me to come,” Lawandy said. “He passed away last September.”
He heard about the program from his teachers and when he met with the staff prior to review the program, he liked it.
“I’m good in math and science,” he said, indicating that he would like to pursue a career in medicine as a doctor.
The students, who took part in this year’s program, had to work together to construct a vehicle that is powered by a mouse trap.
“First they will build them and then they will race them,” said physics teacher Corinne Casey, who before the students started on the project, went over the laws of motion that allowed the vehicles to operate — such as the laws of inertia, friction and tork.
The students – who work in teams of about four students to each car – decide the name for the vehicle, such as is done in NASCAR. The cars are built out of light weight craft wood, a light brass axle, a mouse trap, rubber washer and a rubber stopper to hold it onto the axle.
They also write what they think the car will look like when it is done, providing a drawing. When construction was done, they got to race their cars in the hall against the cars created by the other teams.
The students get parts and instructions, but they also have a work sheet on which they have to work out various physical details such as calculating the speed of the vehicle.
This, according student James Malibiran, an eighth grader from Horace Mann School, is done through a formula.
Malibiran said a friend recommended the program and his grades qualified him to get in.
He said he liked math and thought he would enjoy the program, and while he does not yet know what career he wants to purse, he likes math.
Along with Malibiran, Lawandy’s companions on this project are also good in mathematic and also attracted to the program.
Sean Jahanfar, of PS N. 14, said the program had a good reputation and focused on math and science. He thinks he will eventually pursue a career in medicine as a physician, because he wanted to help people, he said.
Nader Salem, of Woodrow Wilson School, said his brother had attended the program and told him how good it was.
With visions of getting into computer science in the future, he figured a program like this would be a good experience.
Of the team to which he belongs, Lawandy was the only one who had actually constructed a car.
“I did it last summer. It took me three days working eight hours a day,” he said. “I wanted to see if I could do it.”
When asked what he did when finished, he grinned and said, “I went to sleep.”
While team members had few if any disagreements on how to proceed with the project, they all claimed making sense of the instructions provided them with the biggest obstacles.
The 2005 Proyecto Access Summer Academic Enrichment Program stresses the development of abstract reasoning, problem solving skills and their application through the study of high school and university level mathematics, computer sciences and engineering, along with numerous applications of technology such as on-line learning, graphing calculators and related educational software. In addition to these academic activities, Proyecto Access students learn to develop their own website, attend career awareness seminars, hands-on training on database, spreadsheet, power point, and work processor software. The program is conjunction with the PTO, Provident Bank, the Bayonne school district and the New Jersey City University.
Julio Guillen, is the Junior Mentor Supervisor for the project working though NJCU with the students here. He actually went through the program when he was the age of the students here, liked it so much, he eventually got involved with helping to run the program.
“I believe in this program,” he said.