Page 22 - Menlo Magazine: Winter 2018

WINTER 2018
ENGINEERING FOR A BETTER WORLD
Sending alumni out into the world to make a positive di erence is at the core of Menlo’s mission, and to prepare students for the world they will enter, the School aims to build skills like collaboration, empathy, compassion, communication, and creativity across our academic program. Increasingly, Menlo students are engaging in curriculum that allows them to positively impact others while learning these valuable skills. This fall, several seniors had the opportunity to hone their engineering skills while aiding a village in Tanzania, and seventh graders developed prototypes for computer controllers for a person with limited mobility.
“These types of projects are the best of what we do: knowledge and skill acquisition, applied in the real world,
in the service of others,” said Head of School Than Healy. “Add to it that they are fundamentally collaborative projects, and you see how deep the projects reach in developing the skills that will enable our students to make that positive impact in the world.”
The Power to Make a Difference
his summer, Menlo Engineering and Applied Science teacher Dr. James Dann and several other faculty members visited the Banjika Secondary School in
Northern Tanzania as a possible Menlo Abroad destination. As Dr. Dann was learning about the school and getting to know its faculty, he was invited into the sta work area. A giant box sitting in the center of the room piqued his interest. Dr. Dann asked what was hidden beneath the shrine-like cardboard, and the teachers lit up as they told him it was a copy machine.
The teachers explained that they currently had to hand-write hundreds of copies of their tests—one for every student—or send them out to a nearby village to be duplicated, which
took two weeks or more. This donated copy machine, they hoped, would make their lives a little easier and enhance their students’ learning experience. The only problem: the school didn’t have power to operate the machine so the teachers were left looking at it each day, wondering, “What if?”
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