February 2024 STEM Girl Day at UT Austin
On February 24, 2024, ACI Central Texas organized a learning activity for the University of Texas at Austin’s annual STEM Girl Day. A special thanks goes out to our volunteers Amanda Angelo, Bryan Angelo, Charles Hammond, Ian Grice, Jorge Beltran, Nancy Beltran, and Tim Martin for helping put on the event. We would also like to thank Sika Corporation for donating the concrete materials for our demonstration. This event had approximately 10,000 k-8th girls in attendance and sought to kindle an interest in science, technology, engineering, and math programs through hands-on activities.
The activity was titled “Concrete Kids Lab: Exploring the Strength of Reinforced Concrete by Load Testing”. The activity took the attendees on an exciting journey into the world of reinforced concrete with real engineers and allowed them to witness load testing of miniature beams to understand why we add reinforcing steel in concrete.
ACI Central Texas fabricated formwork, miniature concrete beams, a load testing jig, developed a presentation, and gave 9 demonstrations during the day of the event. The presentation was given to the kids to teach them about historical concrete structures such as the Pantheon at almost 2,000 years old, teach them about the ingredients in concrete, what reinforcing steel is, and where tension and compression occur in a beam. At the end of the presentation, 4 load tests of different beam configurations were conducted. The miniature beams for each session consisted of one unreinforced concrete beam, two reinforced concrete beams with different levels of reinforcement, and a beam strengthened with Carbon Fiber Reinforced Polymer (CFRP). In total there were 253 attendees across the 9 sessions that were given over the course of the day! Our volunteers did a great job in representing ACI Central Texas positively in the community.
To learn more about the UT STEM Girl Day program, please visit: https://girlday.utexas.edu/
Please keep an eye out for future opportunities where you can positively engage our community with ACI’s Community Outreach program.
