My high school community took almost the entire week of February 21st off from normal classes to explore something new. Rest assured in knowing, however, that this week off wasn’t just spent binging Netflix or playing video games at home.
Well, Monday and Tuesday probably were, but the following three days were dedicated to legitimate educational inquiry among the student body in topics that they themselves were interested in–instead of Math or English, someone might take, for example, knitting or Shakespearean acting. This program, which the school called Intersession, was held for the first time on Wednesday, February 23rd through Friday, February 25th.
I was first informed of this program in early January, when the co-director of the high school and head of the college guidance department, told me that my name had come up in a meeting after my after-school hovercraft program was mentioned as well. He asked me if I would be interested in teaching a class on a topic of my choosing, and given my interest in teaching engineering to others, I quickly accepted.
As I was already teaching a class on hovercraft mechanics and had already participated in one at Brown, I was fairly certain that I wanted to stray away from that exclusive field of engineering. So I turned to other modes of transportation–namely subway trains, city buses, and ferries–that the student community was almost certainly more familiar with.
But as I’m still an engineer-in-training, I needed to read up on transportation engineering myself. I began an asynchronous course on edX, an online provider of MOOCs (massive open online courses) founded by Harvard and MIT. On the 4th floor of a New York Public Library outlet in Manhattan, I began Urban Transit for Livable Cities, by the School of Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania.
I already had a syllabus in mind: initially, the course would be centered entirely around the New York City Subway and attempting to reorganize its chaotic transit network, which frequently succumbed to service changes, subsequent delays, and even flooding during heavy rainstorms. However, after meeting with Dr. Nuesell the following month, I was told that students who signed up for my course would have the opportunity to participate in other courses as well, so it wouldn’t make sense to base my entire course curriculum around a single project.
The class was split over three days, with a one-hour session each day. I instead decided to have one project per day: one on the Subway, as well as one on the hectic NYC bus system and on the comparatively simpler yet inconsistent interborough ferry service.
Although my class size was rather small–it hovered between 3 and 7 students over the three days–the course went incredibly well. All of the participants came up with excellent solutions to the problems I laid out for them. Here are only a few of the ideas they proposed:
- Utilizing a triangular piece of land in Brooklyn–which is currently occupied by a Volkswagen car dealership–to alleviate bus congestion among three converging lines at 86th Street
- Adding a mechanical boarding ramp to the doors of subway cars that would allow passengers in wheelchairs to board the trains more easily
- Redesigning particularly busy ferry landings, like the Wall Street landing in Manhattan, to allow ferries to pick up passengers and continue onward without going through the otherwise difficult and energy-consuming docking process
(Please keep in mind that any bureaucratic interferences, like cost and land redevelopment, were ruled out in considering these solutions. I wanted the students to get a sense for the pure engineering side of the problems addressed.)
In addition to giving students an opportunity to edit the layout of their city, I gained valuable experience both as a teacher and as an engineer: asking for their opinions gave me an opportunity to witness how they saw New York and how they applied engineering knowledge to fix its problems. As junior year approaches, I will almost certainly be teaching another engineering-minded Intersession class, in the hopes of further exposing the student body to the awe-inspiring world of engineering.