New Lebanon students in Rick Jason’s Materials Science and Processing class complete hands-on projects relating to the construction and building industry.
Recently they transformed their classroom into a testing lab for reinforced concrete. This project-based learning mirrors projects in the real world such as building residential structures in earthquake zones, as well as commercial, industrial and public structures.
Jason said the hands-on approach to learning is often more effective than a typical lecture or textbook work. His lessons began this year by examining crystal structure and atoms, the building block of any material.
“If you can incorporate project-based learning when teaching core concepts, the students are more likely to remember them forever,” he said. “They can make the connection between what they saw, did, and the end result and evaluation.”
This challenge was to see if lighter concrete reinforcement materials have greater tensile strength than rebar steel. Their challenge proved why rebar steel is still the industry standard for reinforcing concrete pillars, columns, footings, foundation walls and bridge supports.
Ninth grade student Nathan Benham said he is interested in pursuing a job in civil engineering after high school and said the concrete project was closely aligned with that career.
“It was fun working with multiple materials, and seeing how bridges and other structures are reinforced,” said Benham.
The hands-on learning also promotes transferrable skills that students can take with them to other classes, projects, college and careers. For example, ninth grade student Ken Sheline is interested in mechanics, but said the project forced them to come up with problem solving skills by figuring out which materials would work better – something you’d need to do in any career.
Students mixed the concrete themselves to create concrete cylinders, each with a different reinforcement material. They even forged the “S” hooks out of steel that would hold buckets of sand for weighting purposes. Students performed mechanical tests to determine the behavior of the reinforced concrete when sand bucket was applied to the center of each cylinder rods.
Students used mathematical equations to calculate the stress for each concrete cylinder rod. Students then graphed their data using Microsoft Excel to analyze and interpret the significance of their data and graphs, explain the variables they had to control, and justify their results. Students also provided evidence as to why some concrete cylinder rods had a point load and tensile strength lower than the control concrete cylinder rod.