On Friday, January 16th, 2026, we hosted twenty-five fourth grade students from the Samuel Adams Elementary School (Boston Public School) for a STEM Field trip focused on civil engineering and disaster preparedness as our first field trip of the Spring 2026 semester! We had several Northeastern student volunteers to help teach and facilitate activities throughout the day.
A very aesthetically pleasing paper tower!
As the students arrived, they learned about engineering and the design process. To demonstrate their understanding, they were immediately presented with a do-now engineering challenge. Students were paired to create the tallest free-standing tower possible out of one sheet of paper and 6 inches of duct tape in just five minutes. A lot of students incorporated nice aesthetics in their towers, like adding smiley faces, stripes, and their initials as final touches to their designs! To add a civil engineering twist, volunteers waved clipboards at their paper towers and shook tables to simulate a hurricane in Florida and an earthquake in California. Some of the towers remained standing!
Students then did an activity focused on natural disasters and emergency preparedness. Volunteer Jamie Chiang (third-year chemical engineering student) taught this activity for the first time!
Students worked in groups to create disaster plans for their assigned natural disaster (earthquakes, hurricanes, heat waves, or blizzards) – figuring out what to do before, during, and after each event. They also designed emergency kits with supplies you’d need to have stocked at home.
Disaster plan making!
We followed this up by transitioning to a hands-on civil engineering challenge: building portable levees! Using materials such as sand, cotton balls, cardboard, tape, and more, students were tasked with creating a makeshift levee that would stop water from harming ‘people’ (symbolized by index cards). The catch? The levees had to be portable – students needed to be able to detach and remove them swiftly and cleanly without making a mess. Volunteers helped test designs by pouring water in a basin and timing how long it took to reach the index card people. Many groups’ designs failed after a couple of seconds, but some groups designed levees that lasted for at least twenty seconds!
During their lunch break, volunteers chatted with students about engineering, high school, extracurriculars, and college. We wrapped the day up with a quick campus tour of Northeastern – though it was very cold!
We’d like to thank Samuel Adams Elementary for being such great engineers and volunteers for all their help!
