Day 6: Bio Inspiration!

Week two began with a bang today! We started the day with a "Do Now" question and discussion led by our wonderful mentors and transitioned into a presentation about our topics for the week (Chemical, Biomedical and Materials Engineering) also led by our mentors (Callie, Michaela, and Eliana). We then welcomed a guest speaker, Max Monn, a PhD student at Brown. He gave us an interesting presentation about bio-inspired materials. Max gave our campers a tour of his lab, which is right down the hall! In the lab, we looked at different specimens under a powerful microscope and tried to guess what they were. We finished testing the bridges from the project we began last week and started researching organisms that we as engineers can pull inspiration from.

We walked to the Blue Room, a campus eatery for lunch. We came back, finished researching in groups and began presenting the final research. Professor Kesari, a mechanical engineering professor at Brown, announced the winner and gave them a special prize, a crystalline structure building kit! Then Joy and Liz presented a lesson on the digestive system and we moved on to our Biomedical Engineering activity, creating pill coatings! We worked in pairs to create a coating for our 'pill' (a skittle) using oil, sugar, corn starch and flour. The team whose coating was the most dissolved after being in seltzer for 10 secons won. We had a wonderful day today and can't wait for the rest of this week's activities!