Next Engineers Johannesburg has started the year with exciting energy. The Engineering Discovery sessions for 2025 have begun. We have engaged with 200 grade 8 learners thus far! Together, we've explored whether water can float on water and learned about a non-Newtonian fluid (Oobleck). These activities use simple household items like cornstarch that can be found in a regular kitchen. We use food coloring to differentiate between different temperatures of water so that we can see how each temperature of water behaves when one is added to the other. For the non-Newtonian fluid, we mix water and cornstarch and put the mixture under different amounts of pressure to see how it behaves.
These two activities have, so far, proved to be exciting for the learners as these experiments don't always go as expected and can be done with materials that they can easily find at home and are safe to use.
We look forward to having more sessions and activities during this year’s Engineering Discovery sessions!
