Investigative Projects in Engineering for Secondary School Students

David C. Shallcross, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria 3010, Australia [email protected] Abstract  This paper describes a series of activities for the senior secondary mathematics class room which have been developed to illustrate how mathematics is used by engineers. In one example students are presented with an innovative design for a single storey underground car park. The class room activity based upon the car park design covers topics such as volumes of revolution, fitting of hyperbolic functions and length of arc calculations. Another example considers the pasteurisation of cream. Students are presented with real physical property data for creams of different fat contents and are then asked to calculate the amount of energy needed to raise the temperature of the cream to a specified temperature for pasteurisation purposes. This activity covers curve fitting to x-y data and integration and introduces the students to chemical and bioprocess engineering concepts.