2003 Alumni News

Future Engineers

Fifteen 9th through 11th grade students from the Agricultural and Food Sciences Academy (AFSA), a charter school in Little Canada, Minnesota, spent a week in the department in May studying engineering. AFSA, in its third year, was established to enable urban/suburban students to study agicultural and food sciences in their high school years. The school has an informal affiliation with the College of Agricultural, Food and Environmental Sciences. We worked with Carl Aakre, a teacher at AFSA in developing the program which emphasized hands-on activities including surveying, GPS, AutoCAD, recording and interpreting weather data, and spread sheet calculations. Staff members Brad Hansen and Deb Hansen, graduate students Gary Feyereisen and Nalladurai Kaliyan, and faculty member Vance Morey worked with the students in these activities. Stacey Madsen Jenkins organized engineering career presentations by faculty members Roger Ruan, Bruce Wilson, and Jonathan Chaplin and the 1/4 Scale Tractor team. AFSA uses a project-based approach for instruction, so at the end of the week, the students turned in a report including their surveying and weather data calculations and their AutoCAD drawings.

During the same week, four other groups from AFSA were on campus studying food science, animal science, environmental science, and crop science. This program is one way that we support K-12 educational efforts. You can find out more about AFSA at http://www.agacademy.com/.

AFSA students received practical experience in surveying on the hill north of the building.

Carl Aakre (center), a teacher at the Academy, works with the students in a GPS exercise.