Catapults will sling and hackeysacks will soar this afternoon as the University of Maryland hosts a national engineering design competition focused on attracting high-school aged minorities to the growing profession.
But catapult is too imprecise a term for these fledgling physicists.
“A catapult is pulled and then let go,” explained Tariq Blakey, a sophomore at Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School. “A trebuchet works on its own weight.”
Blakey and his team huddled around a large table in a university physics lab strewn with wooden blocks, screw bolts, hot glue and twine, putting the finishing touches on their two-foot contraption to go up against more than a dozen others in today’s battle.
Nearby, another team experimented with attaching a sling to a piece of rope tied to their trebuchet’s arm, essentially extending the arm and gaining critical leverage for the launch.
“If we could see whose could knock the other ones down, that’d be pretty cool,” said Jacob Lefler, a junior at Silver Spring’s Kennedy High School.
Behind the medieval-style excitement, the university is using the event to attract more blacks and Hispanics to its engineering programs.
Current minority enrollment numbers are depressing, said Bruk Berhane of the university’s Center for Minorities in Science and Engineering. Of 600 students in next fall’s freshman engineering class, only 47 are Hispanic and only 25 are African-American.
To combat the trends, the center is focusing on reaching minority students at a younger age through initiatives like this summer’s first-time engineering camp for 30 area students, culminating in today’s competition.
According to groups like Arlington-based National Society for Black Engineers, the efforts are paying off. In two years, their membership has doubled to 30,283, said coordinator Latoya LiGonde. Junior membership for middle and high school students has tripled, she said.
“It’s our generation’s job to get more minorities in engineering,” said Annekia Harding, a trebuchet-building junior from Springdale’s Flowers High School. “We have to be forceful about it.”
Harding rattled off physics formulas, without forgetting the most important task at hand.
“We going to storm some castles later,” she said.
