By Alan Lytle
Lexington, KY – Hundreds of area schoolchildren, and their parents, will be visiting the UK campus this weekend to take part in the College of Engineering's annual open house. The event provides faculty and students the opportunity to showcase various cutting edge projects, and encourage boys and girls to pursue a degree in engineering.
"Just to see kind of what engineering offers besides the book education. They can see what applications there are and what cool and exciting things they can do. I know people think of engineering and they kind of think of the boring, sort of the desk job, crunching numbers, but really, nothing could be further from the truth."
UK student Jason Rexroat, says he's looking forward to sharing his involvement in the Kentucky Satellite One space project.
"We're offering an open ham shack so kids will be able to basically watch us track satellites. We've also got high definition live video feeds from the International Space Station. We have astronaut voice loops so you can hear them talking. It's all kinds of opportunities to show people that with engineering you can build things with your hands it's all the science and math things that people say they don't like but the application's amazing and can get you up into space, basically."
Kids can also take part in a Rube Goldberg contest that requires building a machine that must use at least 20 steps just to water a plant. They can also design a container in which a raw egg can survive a 34 foot fall, or try their hand at programming battle codes for robots, then watch them fight each other.
E Day is Saturday from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the UK Engineering Complex.