Leah Pryor gripped the multicolor holds on the rock wall, carefully planning her next move.
The sophomore at Wilkes-Barre Area High School could feel the friction and force. She thought about the math, physics and engineering lessons she had in her classroom.
“Doing this and knowing exactly what's going on, the different mechanisms that are being used, and the different mechanical advantages and stuff like that, I think it's just really interesting,” she said.
Leah and 30 of her classmates from the district's STEM Academy spent Tuesday at the Wilkes-Barre Climbing Gym, using pulleys and considering centers of gravity.
Rob Osmanski teaches the program’s Engineering II course and led students through a unit on rock climbing.
“There's one thing to solve a calculation. Say, ‘Oh, the frictional force is, you know, 25 newtons,’” he said. “But to actually feel that friction helping them stay on the wall, you know, with their grip or their climbing shoes, it's different. It makes it come to life.”
With the help of Sam Elias, an instructional coach at the high school and a rock climber, the lessons became real-world experiences.
The rock climbing became an opportunity to calculate the centroid of a triangle — or a classmate’s center of gravity. Photos the students planned to take Tuesday will be used in a later lesson.
“They're going to use some software, put that picture on a coordinate plane, get the three points of the triangulated position that the climber’s in,” Elias said. “Then they're going to have to basically write the equations of medians and find the point of intersection, which is going to calculate the center of gravity.”
The students will then determine whether the climber was in a solid position based on the calculated center of gravity.
The academy, located within the Plains Twp. school, has about 100 students who receive more exposure to science, technology, engineering and math subjects. The in-demand program hopes to expand, said Keith Eberts, a teacher who also oversees the academy.
At the gym in downtown Wilkes-Barre, students wore harnesses and climbing shoes, attempting to make it to the top of the walls. Excited voices echoed in the gym.
“It's been super cool to put some of our ideas really into action, and to see it for ourselves how much mechanical advantage it has in person,” sophomore Isabella DeGraffenreid said. “We built our own kind of rock climbing pulley in our woodshop, and that was really cool, but to really be able to see it work in person is so different.”
