On Friday, October 18th, we had our third field trip for the semester! This time, the Haley Pilot School came with 44 x 6th graders for a day on Engineering and Natural Disasters. Students were given the goal to create a deployable flood barrier – modeled on Boston’s Coastal Resilience Planning for East Boston (and which was successfully deployed in the real world in Tampa 2024). Their barriers needed to be deployable, meaning they could be easily placed into a location and removed again at the end – and importantly, be 
re-used in the future.
Most groups designed their barrier as a straight wall across the center of the bas
in, but one particularly clever design used a V-shaped design (above), avoiding some of the worst ridges/channels in the bottom of the plastic bin (representing potholes). The best design (not pictured) however lasted a full 50 seconds, utilizing multiple layers of sand in plastic sheets. After the activity wrapped up – we had just enough time for a 30 minute campus tour (with the College 101 panel rolled into the tour. Thanks to all volunteers this day: Abby, Claire, Amanda, Quinn, Reid, Jamie
