I originally did this video for Science Week during COVID in 2021 for Newtown Public School in Sydney Australia. I had presented this to dozens of schools prior to doing this video. And, it is a lot more fun to do it in front of the live audience! But, alas, COVID stopped that but something good came of it. I was able to record it.
I find it amazing that I have done this presentation to age groups from K-12, and all of them can make pretty great guesses at what will happen, and how it will happen.
This confirmed my belief that structural engineering is often much more intuition than maths and science, especially in the discovery stage of a project. You know much more than you think you do.
What is also interesting to discover during doing these presentation is the language that engineers use to describe our work. Words like displacement, bending, shear and torsion. These are not words that exist in everyone’s vocabulary. It guided my communication skills when talk ing to clients.
