Student Activities: ASHRAE Presentations at Doty Elementary School
by Dillon Delano
As the Champlain Valley Chapter’s acting student activities chair, I have taken on the roll of providing a doorway for students to learn about ASHRAE and all it has to offer. I am working to provide students, and their mentors, resources that will help them excel both academically and financially in entering this growing field of HVAC&R.
I recently conducted two presentations at Doty Elementary School in Worcester Vermont, the school that I attended as a child, one for the 3rd and 4th grade class and the second for the 5th and 6th grade class. ASHRAE is a big supporter of STEM and strives to bring a better understanding, awareness, and appreciation for this course work to the student population. With these presentations I wanted to paint a picture of my journey and to show how STEM and ASHRAE contributed to that journey.
We talked about how I struggled in school with math and writing and how hard I had to work to get better at it with practice. We touched on the importance of using the resources that are set in place to help you succeed, like the library and the teachers around them. I also wanted to make a point that there is room for many different types of brains and skill sets in our line of work. I spoke about how I loved art when I was in school and that it has made it easier for me to make design concepts clearer and how color coding can make a huge difference when coordinating a set of complicated drawings. The students were very excited to hear about this and one of the girls in the 3rd and 4th grade class said that it should be STEAM, the “A” being the art portion, and I was happy to hear that.
After wrapping up what I do as a Mechanical Engineer we watched a movie, provided by ASHRAE, called HVAC&R at the Georgia Aquarium. This video highlights three middle school girls as they toured the Georgia Aquarium and learned about how HVAC&R engineering helps keep all the tanks clean and makes the animals happy in their own unique environments.
After the video we conducted an experiment, also provided by ASHRAE, called a STEM Kit. This kit was a pressure drop kit and we used lengths of bendy straws to blow bubbles in a cup of water. We pretended these straws were pipes in the aquarium and we paid close attention to how hard we had to blow into them as we slowly taped more and more straws onto one another. We found that the longer the straw became and the more bends we added the harder it was to blow bubbles. At the end of the activity we talked about how there is rarely ever a piece of pipe the length of one straw and that we have to focus on how we design and place our pipes in a space. I pointed out that we would then determine how big the pumps would have to be to push all the water into the different tanks.
The kids seemed to really enjoy the activity and presentation and I was happy to be there to pass on my industry knowledge and be a mentor to them. I have heard back from the teachers and the kids have been talking about the presentation so I feel I have done my job.
If any of you would like to be a part of showing the younger generation what ASHRAE and STEM has to offer please feel free to get ahold of me through the ashraevt.org website on how to conduct a presentation like this one. There are also a lot of resources available at ashrae.org located on the communities drop down list under Student Zone.
Happy holidays and safe travels everyone!
