Ways to Expose High School Students to Engineering

Projects Discussion and Showcase Education and Teaching
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Hello everyone,
I have been asked by a friend if I could lead a discussion on engineering for middle school and high school students at a local teen center. I enthusiastically agreed! I plan on talking about what engineering essentially is (I know, a very broad topic and I'll need to keep it simple). I also need to incorporate a hands-on activity into my presentation so that the students obviously don't get too bored as well as to give them some exposure of what I'll be talking about.

I have two questions actually in this post. The first is if anyone can think of any very elementary circuits I could use. My initial thought is to do the classic: connect a light bulb with 2 wires. We can throw a switch in there to make things interesting as a second part to the experiment. I could also let them play around with the different ways the light bulb can be lit with the battery. The tricky part is that I imagine I'll only have 1 hour for them to complete the circuit. So, the goal is to make it educational and intriguing, yet still simple/quick. I was wondering if anyone has any other ideas outside of what I have thought of?

Another thing I'd like to give the students would be some resources they could look into that would inspire them into the world of engineering after seeing my presentation. Two things immediately come to mind for me: of course the Arduino and the Raspberry Pi. Does anyone else know of any other things on the market that wouldn't be too advanced for students in this age range? I know Lego has some products, but I'm worried that the high school students would feel they'd be too old for something like that. It doesn't need to be strictly hardware-based resources, a nifty way of exposing them to coding would be great as well!

The outline of my presentation is:

Just so that everyone is aware, my degree is EE with a focus in RF/telecom. I'm not overly savvy with either hardware or coding, which is why I've been tinkering around with an Arduino lately. It's also why I'm reaching out to this forum to people with more experience in hardware/software.

Any help for me on this would be greatly appreciated!

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A good thing to do would be make a motor. You know, one of the ones where you have a magnet and a coil of wire.

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I did that in 7th grade I think - magnet wire, iron nail, wind a coil. Make a rotor with 6 or 8 legs with steel lid from a food can. Run AC thru in & spin the rotor by hand to get it going.
I think we used a 120V to 24V transformer to power it. I remember we had the nail in a drill to spin it while the magnet wire wound onto it.

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AC? How safe is that? What if somebody steps on it? Also, stepped down to 24V it will be 75A. :o

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Apparently a picture is needed.

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This would likely be called a simple AC induction motor.
I made this 40+ years ago, I don't recall the AC voltage used or if a series current limit resistor was used.
I suppose now I would wind the magnet, measure its impedance, and add some resistance if needed to prevent burning out the wire.

Simple AC motor.jpg
Simple AC motor.jpg960×720 36.9 KB

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