After announcing the assignment on the first day, Venkataramanan divided the students into two teams and tasked each with building a wind turbine following Piggot’s instructions. Then, following a lesson in the safe use of power tools, they went to work. For some students — veterans of high school shop class or a grandfather’s basement workshop — the experience was familiar. For most, though, it was a nonstop crash course in welding metal, soldering wire, and molding plastic, not to mention sawing, grinding, and drilling.
“I learned how to weld just within the past two weeks — it was crazy,” marvels Bayer midway through the semester.
“I was kind of worried at first, because I’d never taken a tech class in high school or anything,” adds Kaitlin Brendel x’09. “But, actually, once you get into it and start using the materials, it’s not that bad. It’s kind of fun and exciting.”
One of the students’ toughest assignments was shaping the wind turbine’s wooden blades. In a process that spanned nearly the entire semester, they delicately sculpted planks of wood with a series of precise cuts, and then planed, sanded, and sanded some more. Although undeniably tedious at times, the effort yielded some impressive results, says Brendel, who notes that the students “started out with this big block of wood, and then it turned into this pretty intricate, technical thing.”
At every step, Venkataramanan kept lectures and directions to a minimum, letting the students mostly figure things out for themselves. Inevitably, this led to a fair number of mistakes — and some frustration.