Video: Learning by design
Video: Melanie Gonick This summer, a few dozen Boston-area high school students chose to spend their mornings toiling away with a variety of materials to create working marvels of engineering. They’re this year’s participants in the Engineering Design Workshop, a month-long program that gives teenagers a hands-on experience with the joys and challenges of engineering. Director Ed Moriarty, an instructor at MIT’s Edgerton Center, hesitates to categorize the workshop’s main goal as anything other than “fun.” But if students manage to learn a few basic engineering principles along the way, then all the better, he says.Twenty-two students make up this year’s cohort, a number that has grown steadily over the last decade. Most come from the John D. O’Bryant School of Math and Science in the Roxbury Crossing neighborhood of Boston, but the group also includes several students from other local high schools. Moriarty says the camp is run...