ADAMS TWP A graduate school project turned engineering lesson led a Mars Middle School teacher to be published in an international journal.

Curtis Funkhouser, who teaches technology education at the school, had the article "Egg-citing Vehicle!" published in the March issue of The Technology Teacher.

Funkhouser's article was the result of an innovative engineering lesson he began teaching last year to his seventh grade tech-ed classes. In the unit, teams of two to three students designed vehicles that can withstand a crash without cracking the passenger, which is an egg.

"The idea is to model the real experience of a car engineer," Funkhouser said.

Teams are first shown a video of automotive engineers who explain the design process and how they do not have infinite time and funding to create a vehicle. Teams are given a list of materials, a budget, a 2-by-8 wooden base for the vehicle and sketching materials.

Students then make preliminary sketches, discuss their ideas and then create a final sketch for their vehicle.

Funkhouser must approve each team's final design before the teams create prototypes by using materials they have "purchased."

"The original design isn't always their final design because they learn how materials will or won't work with each other," Funkhouser said.

The five to eight teams then do a pretest with an egg.

"We simulate a real crash using an egg because we wouldn't want to crash any students," Funkhouser joked. "We'd get phone calls over that."

The teams then make any changes to their vehicles based on the pretest, and the competition is on.

"Whoever gets through four crashes and their egg is not cracked or dented, they won the competition," Funkhouser said. "As you can imagine, there's a lot of chanting and yelling and excitement with this."

After the winner is named, each team must give the class a PowerPoint presentation on their vehicle and how they would change it based on the race results.

Funkhouser said there are numerous educational reasons to engage students in the egg vehicle project instead of handing out drawings for a birdhouse or bookshelf construction project, which might have been done in the past.

Funkhouser said the project is student-centered instead of teacher-centered, which promotes critical thinking.

"The students are given an open-ended problem and must design a solution," he said.

Engineering principles such as the physics of a crash as well as mathematics, technology, science and problem solving enter into the design of each car, Funkhouser said of the 12- to 15-day project.

Principal Rich Cornell agreed, saying Funkhouser's project gives the young students a taste of engineering. He said it also prepares students for the rigors of similar courses in higher grades.

"The project is a real world type undertaking from the standpoint that students go through the whole design and manufacturing process," Cornell said.

In addition to serving as a mind-expanding lesson for the seventh graders, the egg vehicle idea was hatched in part to fulfill the requirements of a graduate course Funkhouser took last year in which he had to develop a tech-ed unit and an accompanying activity.

When several of his colleagues in Mars and in the regional tech-ed community urged Funkhouser to submit the project as an article for The Technology Teacher, he approached eighth-grade language arts teacher Gregory Wilson to tap his writing skills. The pair turned out an article and submitted it.

At the magazine, a panel of teachers and experts reviews articles, makes suggestions and returns them to the writers.

Changes are made and the article is resubmitted. Funkhouser's article was accepted and returned once more for nominal changes before being published.

"It's an opportunity to be reviewed and recognized by my peers in the field," Funkhouser said. "It's pretty exciting and very invigorating to my career."

Katie de la Paz, editor of The Technology Teacher, said she is impressed with Funkhouser not only for the article, but also for his talent in the field.

"Curtis Funkhouser is a tremendously talented young teacher who truly grasps the importance of bringing technological literacy to our nation's young people in a way that will leave a lasting impression," de la Paz said from her Reston, Va. office. "He is a rising star in our association, and we're delighted with his recent successes."

Cornell said Funkhouser deserves accolades for his motivation and innovative teaching methods, which are always centered on learning.

"We're very proud of Curtis," he said.