Pottstown Senior Engineers an Informative Summer

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Pottstown High School senior Zachary Beekley, right, during his time a Georgia Tech.

Blogger's Note: The following was provided by the Pottstown School District.

Pottstown High School Senior Zachary Beekley was nominated by engineering teacher Andy Bachman to attend the Envision National Youth Leadership Forum for Engineering this summer.

The eight-day Envision program was held at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. It provided hands-on experience with math and science skills that can be applied to the real world of

A fountain on the Georgia Tech campus.

engineering. 

What follows is Beekley's account of his time in the program:

THE BEEKLEY REPORT; From July 7 to July 14, about 200 other teenagers and I attended the Envision Experience NYLF Engineering program at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta to learn more about the engineering design process, different fields of engineering, and to experience what college life may be like. 

We spent about 10 hours in a classroom each day learning about the steps in the engineering design process and learning about our capstone project. The goal of our project was to design a water system for a small community in a third-world country. 

My team was assigned Banlung, which is also sometimes called Krong Ban Lung, in Cambodia. We designed a system to pump water from a nearby volcanic crater lake, Yeak Laom Lake, into a water tower, which used gravity to distribute the water throughout the community of about 17,000 people. 

Beekley learned coding to program a remote-control helicopter.

Yeak Laom Lake was chosen because it is the largest and cleanest source of water near the village. Our water system also included a sewage system to pump the used water from the community back into the lake after it was cleaned. 

The pumps are all powered by an array of solar panels which provide more than enough energy for each pump.

My team also had to find the total cost of our system, which was about $400,000. 

Each day we had a daily introduction and we had keynote speakers including a woman who works with nanotechnology, a woman who helped create a program to identify objects on the Amazon app, and the lead of Georgia Tech’s admission office. 

We also worked with basic electronics wiring, Arduino boards, and basic coding to

Beekley saw sharks behind the scenes at the Georgia Aquarium

control an IR remote controlled helicopter. We also took a tour of the Georgia Tech campus. 

We were given a " Behind the Seas" tour at the Georgia Aquarium, which showed us the processes behind the scenes for the aquarium to function. 

Throughout the trip, I learned more about the engineering design process, which fields of engineering I enjoy and might consider for a career, what college life may be like, and what I need to be a good applicant for a college I wish to attend. 

I will have a great story to tell at the start of school when a teacher asks me what I did during the Summer.