MUSCATINE, Iowa — Nearly 70 Muscatine High School Students weren’t in their  classrooms Wednesday morning, but they were still learning.

The subject? Engineering.

The lessons? Launching ping poll balls and gluing Popsicle sticks together.

The students spent time at Stanley Consultants learning more about engineering.

Mary Jo Finchum, public relations administrator for Stanley, said this is the fourth year her company has created a student program for National Engineers Week, which runs from Feb. 15-21 this year. The event is geared toward guiding more students toward an engineering career path. 

Finchum said the industry is experiencing a shortage of engineers and Stanley, like many engineering firms across the country, has joined a national effort to attract more students to the field.

“We can’t have enough students go into engineering,” Stanley Consultants  President Gayle Roberts told the students as the event began. “And engineering can take you a lot of places.”

Finchum said that students asked for hands-on activities during past events, so this year her company included time for teams of five students to build their own engineering projects.

Each group had an hour to build one of four projects that Finchum found on the National Engineering Week Foundation’s Web site.

Materials and descriptions of the projects were provided and a professional engineer was assigned to each group to offer advice.

“We owe it to our youths, to pass on what we’ve learned,” said John Sayles, 74, a retired city planner who worked at Stanley Consultants for 39 years. Sayles led a group of students who designed a ping pong ball launcher.

“When I was going to school, we never had anything like this,” he said.

MHS senior Sabra Cacho wants to be an architect and was interested in the program because she will need to take engineering classes to pursue that field in college.

“If you’re going to make a bridge, make a truss bridge,” said Cacho, as she used a glue gun to bond some of the 250 Popsicle sticks that came with her team’s kit. “It’s sturdier and it holds a lot more weight.”

Other projects included constructing a table using rolled up newspaper for the legs and building a moving vehicle using a mouse trap to provide momentum.

When the hour was up, students brought their projects to the Stanley Auditorium and made presentations.

After a pizza lunch, the students boarded a bus for  Muscatine’s Monsanto Plant and took an afternoon tour of that company.

Muscatine High School  teachers Sarah Wilson and Taylor Fountain accompanied the MHS students who were joined by several students from L-M and Rockridge high schools.

“The best part is having students talk things over with an engineer,” said Wilson. “It gives students experiences we haven’t been able to give them before.”