Wheaton expo displays everything engineering

Airplanes. Bridges. Tractors. Bicycle machines. Even computers, lasers and robots.

Ask any professional at the DuPage Engineers Week Expo and he or she would know what connects these objects: Engineering.

The Illinois Institute of Technology's School of Applied Technology presented the 27th annual expo Saturday at the Rice Campus in Wheaton. The event aims to interest elementary-aged children in engineering while they have time to gain the education necessary to succeed in the field, said Barbara Kozi, executive assistant to the dean of the School of Applied Technology.

“Our hope is that they'll see things here that make them think ‘Oh, that's engineering? That's interesting,'” Kozi said.

Many of the expo's more than 40 displays were interactive, including bicycles that spun a globe, powered a record player or lit up a device similar to a traffic light. Working Bikes, a Chicago nonprofit that resells and redistributes donated bicycles, brought the bicycle machines during its first appearance at the expo, volunteer Carly Evans said.

Kids pedalled until tropical tunes rose from the record player while parents joked there should be a similar machine to power TVs.

Kozi expected the event to draw between 1,200 and 1,500 people, from 3-year-olds to grandparents.

“It's mostly to encourage the students to get involved in engineering and learn more about the fun of being an engineer,” said Jamal Grainawi, past president of the Arab American Association of Engineers and Architects, whose organization was running a guessing game in which participants estimated the amount of weight a thin, 10-gram, wooden bridge could support before breaking.

The event seemed to strike up scientific interest in 7-year-old Grace Dawson of Chicago. Grace visited a table set up by the Chicago section of the American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers where she played with a model farm tractor and reaper.

“It's about the whole world of harvesting advances that's taken place in the last 200 years,” Lyle Bohnert, an officer in the organization, said about the display.

After learning about skyscrapers and nuclear reactors, Grace said she liked science and engineering.

“Yeah, now I do,” she said. “I wonder how much stuff these guys make.”

In a sense, engineers are involved in making everything, Kozi said. And that's exactly what the expo wanted to convey.

“Everything in our world is engineering, really,” Kozi said. “We just want to get them (students) intrigued.”