Steam Engines
By: Trisha Gaya and Mariana Ferreira
Project
Junior
Grade 11
Our entry is about steam engines and how they affected our society. We first came up with a series of inventions such as the camera, refrigerator, and light bulb. We thought those would be obvious choices when it comes to innovations of history so we decided to choose something from automobiles. Talking about cars in general would be too broad of a subject and so from there we narrowed it down to either tires, the type of material the automobiles are made of, and engines. Engines seemed to be more interesting than the other two so we decided to go with that, but there are types of engines also so we considered what type of engine would make most sense in doing a project on and we finally decided to go with the steam engine because it was the first type of engine. This topic relates to the national theme because it has helped us progress in automobiles. We ended up participating in the History Fair because it is a requirement and also because we do not want to acquire a bad grade for not participating.
We went online to find most of our information because the internet has such a large amount of information. We also went to the library to find some information but most of what we found was already online. Most of our valuable information was found on about.com, it has a lot of information about our topic. We realized we did not know much anything about our topic other then the fact that it was used to move trains. We also did not know whether or not we could actually create a project on this topic. The more we researched the more we realized that steam engines played an important role in the progression of combustible engines we use today. We had to decide on whether some information was necessary and which information was not. Most of what we found about the steam engine was useful. Who created the steam engine, how what it created, how was it used, and how it works is...