Collected Item: “Concrete Engineering at Home”
Give your story a title.
Concrete Engineering at Home
What sort of object is this: text story, photograph, video, audio interview, screenshot, drawing, meme, etc.?
Photographs of concrete cylinder
Tell us a story; share your experience. Describe what the object or story you've uploaded says about the pandemic, and/or why what you've submitted is important to you.
In 2020, the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Melbourne posted a tiny bag of cement to each second-year engineering student to create a miniature concrete column for their final assessment. In ordinary times, these students would have visited one of the city’s megaprojects to watch a concrete pour, but with construction barely operating and site visits banned, this was how the theory of the concrete mix was put into practice. There was a “slump test” to gauge the pliability of the mix and then the finished product could be assessed for its strength. My slump was good; my column, I suspect, would have failed at its base due to an overabundance of aggregate. For me, it was the highlight of a year of online study, and perhaps even more rewarding than it might have been in ordinary times. Now, I have a treasured (and very heavy) paperweight by which to remember my experience. Submitted for University of Melbourne HIST30060, Semester 2 2021.
Use one-word hashtags (separated by commas) to describe your story. For example: Where did it originate? How does this object make you feel? How does this object relate to the pandemic?
university,engineering,concrete,home,miniature,lockdown
Who originally created this object? (If you created this object, such as photo, then put "self" here.)
Patrick Gigacz
Give this story a date.
2020-11-01