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A SWE Industry/University Alliance for Grades K-12 Outreach

Rhonda J. Lee-Desautels University of Kentucky

Introduction

This paper describes a K-12 outreach program developed by professional members of the Society of Women Engineers (SWE) Region G section located in the Paducah area, and the SWE student section located at the University of Kentucky (UK) Paducah Extended Campus. The UK-Paducah SWE student section is small, consisting of around ten students. However, this student section has the unique advantage of being located in a heavily industrialized region, which has meant a large support structure of female professional engineers in the area. There are six practicing and one retired professional engineers locally that are part of the SWE Region G section. The development of the program has been a collaborative effort, with the main goal of stimulating interest in engineering as a career for K-12 female students. The accomplishment of this goal will be through a combination of hands-on activities, pointed question and answer sessions, and, most importantly, through the intimate contact with females actively working, or pursuing, careers in engineering. The effort has involved extensive meetings with participation from both students and professionals. These meeting have involved scrutinizing past outreach efforts that have had limited success, and developing new methods of approach.

Background

The pursuit for a coordinated K-12 outreach program came out of the frustration experienced in the past trying to secure an audience for previous activities. In the past, other than an occasional Girl Scout demonstration, our K-12 outreach activities consisted of a program entitled, “Introduce a Girl to Engineering” that took place during our annual Engineering Day activities. UK-Paducah hosts an annual Engineering Day, open to the public, which includes many on-site demonstrations and competitions such as the Edible Car Competition, the Egg Drop, and Bridge Building Contest. Our program consisted of a panel format with the panel made up of both professional female engineers from local industry and female engineering students. The program began with a general slide show about the engineering profession followed by each panel participant spending 5 or so minutes talking specifically about their personal background in

“Proceedings of the 2004 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright  2004, American Society for Engineering Education”

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Lee-Desautels, R. (2004, June), A Swe Industry/University Alliance For K 12 Outreach Paper presented at 2004 Annual Conference, Salt Lake City, Utah. 10.18260/1-2--13687