Everyday Engineering
Explore engineering challenges with these fun and easy STEM at home activities you can do with items found around your house.
STEM@Home
Try your hand at a variety of STEM activities developed for our award-winning documentary Dream Big: Engineering Our World.
ASCE Bridge Designer, Cloud Edition
Learn the basics of bridge design using our web browser based system. Each user of Bridge Designer solves the problem of designing and testing a highway bridge.
Dig deeper
Dream Big: Engineering Our World: Take a journey of discovery from the world’s tallest building to a bridge higher than the clouds and witness how today’s engineers are shaping the world of tomorrow. (42 minutes, available on Netflix and Vimeo).
Earthquakes
- Meet Geotechnical Engineer Menzer Pehlivan: Inspired by living through an earthquake, this engineer in Nepal explores how the stability of soil keeps buildings standing.
- Dream Big - Meet the Women Engineers: Menzer Pehlivan, Avery Bang, and Anjelica Hernandez share their experiences as female engineers.
Solar
- Philippines: Plastic Bottles Go Solar. See what a difference daylight can make for this building in the Philippines.
- Dream Big - Lean and Green: Engineering Alternative Energy. Learn how engineers are looking for ways to use renewable energy sources such as sun and wind.
Water
- Dream Big - Quenching A Thirsty World: Water Engineering. Watch how engineers are finding innovative ways to provide clean water.
- Dream Big - Water Wishes: Engineering for Those in Need. See how college students are bringing clean water to a village in Peru.
- Historic water treatment sites:
- The Lawrence Experimental Station. A pioneer engineering laboratory for research on the treatment of water supply, sewage and industrial waste.
- The Metropolitan Milwaukee Sewage Treatment Plant. America's earliest large-scale activated sludge type municipal sewage treatment plant.
- Water treatment pioneers:
- Ellen Henrietta Swallow Richards. The first woman to graduate from MIT, a trailblazer in sanitary engineering and public health, and the founder of home economics.
- Abel Wolman. Wolman combined engineering with public health and hygiene into the field that came to be known as sanitary engineering.
Wind
- Dream Big - Holding Sway: Wind Engineering - See how engineers used wind testing to build the Shanghai Tower, one of the tallest buildings in the world.
- Alexandre Gustave Eiffel - designer of the Eiffel Tower and engineer behind some of the first wind tunnels.
- The Boundary Layer Wind Tunnel Laboratory (PDF) -This ASCE Historic Landmark was the first wind tunnel built explicitly to test the effects of wind on the built environment.