Engineering Design Students Focus on Wind Turbine Project

Huntington High School science teacher Amelia Saggese’s engineering design students sprang to life with a recent lesson and project focused on wind turbines.

“The students completed research then designed 2D and 3D models of wind turbines and wind farms on our WhiteBox Learning engineering design program,” Ms. Saggese said. “The program allows student to compete within the same class, with students in my other classes, and they can even compete with other students nationally.”

The students then printed their scaled turbine blade design, carefully constructed their turbines and connected them to voltmeters to determine the amount of voltage produced by their turbine when under three different fan speeds to represents the various wind speeds turbines will encounter in nature.

“The students’ wind turbines have heights of about two feet and produce enough power to turn on an LED bulb,” Ms. Saggese said. “Wind turbines on Long Island’s South Fork Wind Farm are approximately 840 feet tall and power approximately 70,000 homes.”

This project was one of many in the Engineering Design course. “We explore projects throughout the various fields of engineering, such as glider planes, bridges, coding and constructing Arduino circuit boards, mousetrap cars, rockets, prosthetics and many others,” Ms. Saggese said. “Engineering Design is a hands-on, inquiry-based, full year science course for 11th and 12th grade students whether they are interested in pursuing a career in engineering or if they do not want to study science beyond high school but still want to have fun while learning science in a project-based course.”