Engineering Inc. - Winter 2020 - 42

"The best way we can give back is to
use our talents for STEM education
and career exploration."
LAURA NICK
CORPORATE COMMUNICATIONS LEADER
GARVER

such as kinetic energy, force, and Newton's Laws of Motion.
The project also provided an important
lesson that transcends engineering and
science: the value of perseverance. Biegler
says that when Garver employees came
to the school to demonstrate how chain
reactions work, their own device malfunctioned on the first try.

GARVER

own Rube Goldberg devices in the following weeks.
Lacee Stanley, a transportation project
engineer in Garver's Tulsa, Oklahoma,
office, nominated the middle school
she attended. The school was chosen to
participate, and Stanley was able to handdeliver a STEM kit to her former fifthgrade teacher and work hands-on with
students at her old school.
"It was a lot of fun," Stanley says. "It was
interesting to work with the students and
try to get them to think outside the box.
At first, they were unsure if they could do
it, but we told them there were no rules."
It was not long before they started getting creative and thinking about how they
could attach something to the ceiling or
use other items in the room, she notes.
Initially, Garver planned to give out a
$1,000 prize to each of the top five videos
sent by schools, but the company received
so many quality submissions that it ultimately gave out nine $1,000 prizes-plus
a Grand Champion award.
One of those nine honorees was Pat
Henry Elementary in Lawton, Oklahoma.
The project gave Doris Biegler, a STEM
teacher at the school, a chance to teach
her students practical lessons on topics

GARVER

E-Week kickoff
event at Pat Henry
Elementary School in
Lawton, Oklahoma, the
first of 100 schools
to receive a STEM kit
from the firm.

Edward Keenan, Garver North Texas plant team leader, oversees Dallas Independent School District students
test their contraptions at the Dallas Museum of Art.

ENGINEERING INC.

WINTER 2020

"It was nice for the kids to see that even
professionals in the field have mess-ups,"
Biegler says. "Then they reset it, and it
worked the second time."
Biegler's students worked in three
groups to create portions of the chain
reaction, and then other students connected the different parts. When it was
time to record the device in action,
Biegler says, it took more than 40
attempts to get it to work right.
"Students loved it," she says. "They
were very proud of themselves, and they
wanted everyone in the school to be able
to see what they had done and what they
had made."
Garver also held a few larger events as
part of the initiative, inviting some of its
clients to attend. Marc Williams, deputy
executive director for the Texas Department of Transportation, served as a judge
at a multischool event at the Austin
Public Library.
"It sounded like fun," he says.
But that is not the only reason he
got involved.
"We owe it to our profession to take the
time to help reach out to that next generation of professional engineers," Williams
says. "We rely on the next generation of

Engineering Inc. - Winter 2020

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