Beyond the pipeline: building a K-12 engineering outreach program

Lessons Learned in K-12 Engineering Outreach and Their Impact on Program Planning (Evaluation)

“…Likewise, field trips result in much of the same. Mentoring programs provide great influence on students, but most of the programs for students are one to two-week long summer camps or competitions that utilize a variety of handson activities [3,7,[13][14][15]17]. Douglas et al [8] and Ralston et al [15] note the importance of hands-on learning for attracting students to engineering and some of the most proven attributes of such activities are self-motivation, real-life application, and immediate feedback [2].…”

“…Student-focused programs generally include onsite presentations, field trips, mentoring programs, summer camps, and project competitions [3,6,12,13,15,17]. Onsite presentations are the quickest and most efficient way to reach a large number of students [3], but presentations do little more than provide an introduction to the field.…”

“…Jeffers et al [3] states, "The key is to have informed and motivated teachers that can excite and instill confidence in their students." Professional development opportunities should introduce techniques for integrating content within the curriculum [6,20] and teachers should have an opportunity to experience what they will have their students do [13]. Best practices show that teacher workshops followed by student camps are the most effective sequences for teacher development.…”

“…Although teacher workshops provide the low-pressure environment for teachers to experiment, engineering content must align with state math and science standards for inclusion within the curriculum [2,3,6,[12][13][14][15]. Some schools offer pre-engineering courses such as Project Lead the Way and The Infinity Project, which compliment existing math and science courses, but require students to be enrolled in a college prep math sequence or have already completed various math courses (e.g.…”

“…If the percentage of such groups in engineering is to remain comparable with percentages of the United States' population, organizations must focus their efforts on these groups. Consequently, an abundance of outreach activities exist throughout the country with a common goal to increase the awareness of and interest in engineering [2,3,[5][6][7][8][9][10][12][13][14][15][16][17]. Sullivan et al [13] and Jeffers et al [3] list a number of activities typically taken by outreach programs, which generally fall into three focus areas: 1) students, 2) teachers, and 3) curriculum development.…”