Dowagiac News: Engineering lessons for elementary students

Nancy Leonard, mother of new Miss Dowagiac first runner-up Gabrielle Leonard, got into engineering by accident--not through encouragement, reports the Dowagiac News. Now she's encouraging students at Justus Gage Elementary to learn about engineering--"They’re going to learn about acceleration, pressure and force"--by building balloon-powered cars, loading it with pennies and making measurements to adjust wobbly performances on a test track anchored by textbooks. 

 

Excerpt: "As a young person, I was not very good in math," she said. "But I kept getting passed along. In 10th grade, my geometry teacher told me to never do anything in math because I sucked. After I got my first bachelor’s degree, that teacher worked at Kroger’s in the summer. I walked up to him and said, 'I want you to know that after all this time and all of the troubles I had in your class, I found a math teacher who could teach me and I’m designing brakes now.'"

 

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