2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The field of aerospace engineering suffers from a misconception that it is not applicable to "everyday life," that is, the day-to-day experiences of people across the country. This is perhaps a consequence of the old adage "the sky's the limit." We have pushed that limit beyond the confines of Earth's atmosphere but potentially at the cost of leaving behind untapped potential in the realm of solving some of the world's most pressing problems - climate change and its impact on the most vulnerable of our communities. In this presentation, we describe the development of a community-based engineering curriculum that is designed to engage middle school students in developing engineering solutions to everyday problems of living in an increasingly hot world. Using foundational principles of fluid dynamics, we prompt students to investigate the ways in which they and fellow community members keep cool in extreme heat and connect those heuristic processes to fundamental principles such as Bernoulli's Law.