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Children learn by doing,
by building,
by creating.
Those of us who dream big
can carry that joy of creativity
all through our lives.
Bechtel is proud to present
"Dream Big."
002, -001, 002.
Okay, attitude 25.10, pitch 64.18 plus 002.
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We never really saw our world
until they showed it to us.
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Through the power of imagination,
they astonish us.
They're called engineers.
With each life-changing creation,
like the International Space Station,
engineers enhance the human experience.
They build civilizations.
Every bridge, every building grows
from an engineer's imagination.
There are now seven billion of us.
And by 2045,
there will be two billion more.
Where will we all live?
Will we have enough clean energy?
The boldest solutions
start with the biggest dreams.
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FA“
Menzer Pehlivan
grew up in Turkey.
I was a girly girl.
I was a lead in schools plays.
I actually wanted to be an actress.
Until I was 13, when everything changed.
We lived in a high-rise building.
I remember my mother waking me up,
terrified that the building would come down.
I remember watching the people suffering.
From that moment on, I knew what I wanted to do.
Today, I'm a professional engineer in Seattle,
hoping to make structures safer during earthquakes.
I love my job.
And I want kids to be excited about engineering
as much as I am.
So, are you ready for the earthquake?
- Yeah! - Yeah?
Three, two, one.
Let's start slow.
- Which one is... - Go faster.
To design safer buildings,
we study how soil moves during an earthquake.
The engineers test building prototypes
on the big shake table.
To learn more, Menzer studied countries like Nepal,
where earthquakes can be severe.
Nepal is a very poor country,
where most of the houses were built
without any engineering design.
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Stone houses, they're an accident waiting to happen.
In 2015,
a massive earthquake struck Nepal.
8,000 lost their lives.
But some survived.
Including the miracle baby,
buried in the rubble for 22 hours.
To do her part, Menzer took time off from work
and flew to Nepal
to join a team of fact-finding engineers.
We collect data on ground failures
before the evidence washes away.
We need to work fast.
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Namaste. Namaste.
Different types of soils act differently.
Some soils act like a Jell-0.
Others act like a liquid
and lose all their strength.
Farmers led us to a field,
where carrots popped out of the ground--
a clue that this soil acted like a liquid
during the earthquake.
That's what we call liquefaction.
I remember when I was 13.
I know what these kids are going through.
The emotional aftershock of an earthquake
can last for years.
This is why I became an engineer.
After leaving Nepal,
Menzer went to San Francisco.
Here, engineers had a unique challenge--
designing the city's tallest skyscraper
at a site prone to liquefaction.
The engineers solved it from the ground up.
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Menzer's team tours the site,
where engineers sunk massive concrete columns
all the way down to bedrock
to resist earthquakes.
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Keeping people safe
has always been the heart and soul of engineering.
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The first emperor of China faced a problem:
Mongol warriors were invading from the north.
So the emperor's engineers began building something
that would preserve their civilization
for almost 2,000 years.
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The Great Wall grew to be 13,000 miles long...
the largest structure ever built by humans.
After centuries of erosion and earthquakes,
much of the wall survives.
Steve Burrows, an engineer from England,
has come to investigate.
It's really tough to study the wall
when it stands there right on a knife edge
on the top of a mountain.
But we have our ways.
This is lidar,
the laser imaging device.
The lidar showed that the most precisely built parts
are standing well today.
However, miles away, badly built sections of the wall
are also still standing.
Why?
500 years ago, the builders added
a secret ingredient to their mortar:
sticky rice.
Adding sticky rice and lime to the mortar,
it makes the mortar more elastic
'cause it allows the wall to stretch and contract
depending on the temperature.
Sometimes the best solution
is the simplest--
the one staring up at you
from your dinner plate.
In western China,
across the highest bridges on Earth,
people are moving from farms to cities.
Shanghai is now the most populous city in the world--
24 million people.
But there's a problem.
No more space to build.
Where can they all live?
Engineers squeezed an entire urban district
into one city block...
by going vertical.
They envisioned China's tallest building,
the Shanghai Tower,
rising 128 floors high
with space for 16,000 people.
But the taller the structure,
the more it flirts with Mother Nature.
Each summer,
typhoons blast the city.
The Shanghai Tower would soon
become a huge target.
But the engineers had
some tricks up their sleeve.
By twisting the outer skin 120 degrees,
the wind safely glides around the tower.
Here, the problem of population density
has been met.
All thanks to the ingenuity
of a twist.
Wind is an intriguing challenge
for engineers of all ages.
Menzer makes a game of it.
Okay, this competition will count as ten points.
And the tallest skyscraper that resists the wind
will get five extra.
Yay! Excited?
All right.
Now, remember, planning is important.
Before cutting...
make sure what you're building.
Building these paper skyscrapers
teach kids the most important thing...
engineering is fun.
Oh, it's getting...
Oh, no!
In 1940,
the newly opened Tacoma Narrows Bridge, near Seattle,
earned the nickname Galloping Gertie.
A moderate wind gusting to 40 miles an hour
made the bridge bounce...
resulting in collapse.
Fortunately, no one was killed.
Engineers learn from catastrophes.
New insights about the impact of wind on suspension bridges
have led to better designs.
Near Menzer's home in Seattle,
two safer bridges have replaced Galloping Gertie.
A large bridge can connect people.
And so can a small one.
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After graduating from college,
a young bridge engineer had a choice to make--
accept a high-paying job
or follow her heart.
Today, Avery Bang
leads a team of passionate engineers
building foot bridges in poor countries.
In Haiti,
I worked with kids whose village was isolated.
Just across river was the only school.
And they could see it,
it was right there,
but they just couldn't get to it.
Over the past decade,
50 people have drowned trying to cross this river.
A man who grew up by the river,
Fritz Touissand, offered to help.
He had a very personal stake in this bridge.
Three years ago,
when our youngest girl needed medicine,
Mathilde, my wife, headed off
to the clinic across the river.
The river was very high that day.
Now I have eight children
to raise on my own.
To get to school,
my kids cross the river
right where their mother drowned.
Mathilde was everything to them.
They needed a bridge.
At least, it's going to be a really big bridge.
Our mantra
is "Keep it simple."
With this new hinge design Avery came up with,
the crew can raise tall towers,
using nothing but ropes.
...erected from horizontal to vertical.
Right. Okay.
A young Haitian engineer named Junior Pierre Louis
has joined the team.
Working with local engineers like Junior
has a ripple effect.
Today, we're building one bridge.
Tomorrow, they may build ten more on their own.
Avery's decision to follow her heart
has had a huge impact.
Her team of engineers has volunteered
to build nearly 200 bridges
where they're needed most.
Similar engineering groups
have built thousands more worldwide.
Every waterway challenges engineers.
For centuries, trains could climb Scotland's rugged hills,
but boats?
It once took an entire day
fer a beat to be raised here,
using 11 cumbersome locks.
But then, a team of visionary engineers
reinvented the wheel--
The Falkirk Wheel.
The arm with the heavier boat
carries less water,
so the wheel always remains perfectly balanced.
It uses just a wee bit of electricity.
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Falkirk is frugal with electricity.
But renewable energy
holds an even brighter future.
From their small town in Mississippi,
these high school students
will take the solar car they built themselves
and compete in the Solar Challenge.
Some of the kids have never been to the next county,
much less Australia.
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My name's Ajay Patel.
I'm in the tenth grade
and this is my second year on the solar car team.
I like the hands-on part,
where you can actually, like, drill
and use our brains more
and solve problems.
In the Solar Challenge,
the world's top university teams
will race 1,600 miles
on solar power alone.
All the cars are kind of strange and elegant.
They're really extreme and expensive.
A-All of 'em except for one.
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It's seriously hot inside the car.
120 degrees Fahrenheit.
It's not moving.
Our new lithium batteries
aren't holding a charge.
By tilting the solar panels towards the sun,
we were able to squeeze just a bit more power
out of the batteries.
Just enough to keep going.
And we were proud to cross the finish line.
Even if we were the last ones.
Solar energy can power a single car
or an entire city.
The world's largest solar facility,
the lvanpah Solar Electric Generating System,
reduces C02 emissions by over 1,000 tons every day.
Hundreds of thousands of mirrors
slowly pivot to keep the hot spot
focused on the boiler at the top.
Water inside turns to steam and drives turbines,
which produce electricity for our cities,
like Phoenix, Arizona...
where Angelica Hernandez is an engineer
working on renewable energy.
I feel like I've really got it all.
You know, I have an amazing husband,
I have a super cute baby
and a job as an engineer, which...
which is one of my dreams.
But, you know, I didn't start out that way.
I grew up on the poor side of town.
My mom worked really, really hard
just m get by-
Then I went to Carl Hayden High School,
where I met an amazing, inspiring teacher
who changed my life:
Fredi Lajvardi.
So I see one way you could solve this.
You could stop your catapult...
l joined his after-school robotics class
and the problems weren't easy to solve,
but Fredi always knew how to make it fun.
That will leave you with a higher trajectory...
You're doing a good job.
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The kids were just having so much fun.
They were learning so much.
They didn't even realize that they were learning
and that was the best part.
Good catch!
Awesome.
They heard about
a national underwater robotics competition
in Santa Barbara, California.
And, on a whim,
decided to enter.
Heads up!
We didn't have much funding.
But if you can't be expensive,
be clever.
So we used cheap landscaping pipe.
In Robotics Club, Fredi taught us a system:
to find the problem, come up with different solutions
and pick the best one.
But the one problem we couldn't solve
was the smell of the pipe glue.
It just stunk.
So we named our robot Stinky.
- It's working, yeah. - Yes.
Stinky was a bunch of pipe
with a little bit of CPU
and a whole lot of cables.
Six months and $800 later,
Stinky was ready to go.
Here, guys, let's, uh, hurry up
and get Stinky in here.
Sadly, Angelica had work commitments,
and had to miss the trip.
I was really disappointed, but, you know,
I said my good-byes and off they went.
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The team arrived in Santa Barbara
the day before the competition.
Some of the best engineering programs in the country
compete, like MIT, the champs from the year before.
We were going with the mindset
that we were going mainly as observers.
And if we beat just one college,
that would be phenomenal.
When we arrived there, I mean,
we looked like the carnival had arrived.
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Just a raggedy robot.
Looked like we'd just pieced together
everything from a junkyard.
That's MIT.
The other robots
were like pieces of underwater jewelry.
They were chrome.
There was stainless steel.
There were manufactured plastics.
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These high school kids
wanted to quickly test Stinky before anyone noticed them.
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The robot was going left
when they wanted it to go right.
It wouldn't go up when they wanted it to go up.
We had to figure out what was going on.
Fredi has always told his students
when you get in a jam, start asking smart questions.
We had a small leak but no clue where it was.
If we can't find the leak, what can we do?
And then Lorenzo asked everybody,
"Aren't tampons really absorbent?"
This was a do-or-die kind of situation.
- I got 'em! - Yeah! -Yes!
It wasn't about building a robot.
It was about learning haw to learn for yourself.
The boys arrived at the competition exhausted,
without a chance to test Stinky.
Carl Hayden High School,
- you have one minute. - Let's go, guys!
Do it! You can do it!
We had no idea if the solution would work.
Thanks to a wild idea, Stinky was working again.
The boys had 30 minutes to complete ten tasks.
The college teams had a laser to measure distances.
Carl Hayden couldn't afford one.
They used a tape measure instead.
The hardest task
was to sample a fluid from a barrel...
with a tube.
Most of the teams didn't even attempt it.
When we went straight to it,
it just-just fell into it,
like it was meant to be or something.
At the awards banquet,
they heard something that surprised everyone.
And second place goes to...
...Massachusetts Institute of Technology!
MIT got second place.
I was thinking, "Who's first?
"Oh, man, who's-- who beat MIT?
This is, this is gonna be awesome."
First place goes to...
Carl Hayden High School from Phoenix, Arizona!
Oh!
It was almost disbelief.
Is this a dream or is this for real?
I don't remember walking to the stage,
because, you know, I was just floating, I think.
What started out as a crazy idea
turned into something so much more.
Today, that high school robotics club
has grown exponentially,
largely thanks to Fredi.
Knowing that somebody believes in you,
even though you don't believe in yourself,
even though you doubt that you could do something,
um, I think, you know, if you could find that in somebody,
it's just... it's a blessing.
It was because of him that Angelica went to Stanford.
Now my husband Juan and I
are both engineers in Phoenix.
And, I mean, you never know.
Maybe my daughter will be one, too.
And any chance I get, I like to help
my favorite teacher inspire future engineers.
...the same thing with this one.
It's not doing it, because it's a triangle.
It's very solid. It doesn't change shape.
So now we want you to come up with different ways
to make the bridge stronger--
so you see the truck in front of you--
so it can make it across the bridge.
- You guys want to try that? - Yeah!
- All right. Let's try it. - Hey, let's do it.
Well, I think they need to try to have more triangles.
There's barely any support going along the bottom.
Yeah, I think they should put a sign
and say "no trucks allowed."
The screw's not stable, period, because it fell apart.
- The whole bridge. -lt's not stable at all.
We have to remind ourselves about budget cost.
Yeah, but how about we cross that bridge when we come to it?
Because I think...
Young minds find new paths.
It was not physics alone that led to
the Millau Bridge in France-- it was art.
That one! -PEHLIVAN: That one over there, right?
- And what are the triangles for? -
Young minds will shape our future.
- It provides, uh, stability, right? -Yeah.
Some young engineers have a bold dream
to revolutionize transportation.
It's called Hyperloop.
If they succeed, they'll allow us
to travel 700 miles per hour.
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That's from L.A. to San Francisco in 30 minutes.
By the end of the century, 90% of us will live in cities,
an exciting challenge for engineers.
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The bigger cities get,
the smarter they'll need to become.
This new transportation hub
in San Francisco will feature a network of wireless sensors.
This will make it safer,
more energy-efficient,
and smarter.
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The more urban we become,
the more we need trees, gardens,
and places to play.
The word "engineer" means "ingenious."
I love being an engineer.
I create things from nothing.
From blank sheets of paper, I can change cities.
I can change the future.
The joy of engineering the future
belongs to the young.
What better time to start dreaming big.
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FA“