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Engineering Your Future Project for High School Students

Abstract

Through a program known as, “The College Institute”, Montgomery College, Rockville, offers a series of freshmen college-level courses to high schools in Montgomery County. One of the courses offered is ‘Introduction to Engineering Design’, also known as ES 100, which offers a wide variety of introduction topics in engineering, as well as an opportunity for students to work on a design project in teams. While the current program of study is effective in getting students excited in Engineering and its many disciplines, and in giving students a wide range of practical introductory experience in Engineering, it lacks the ability to get students to consciously develop a career path in engineering, and begin considering the necessary academic and experiential steps required in order to experience a successful career in the engineering discipline of their choice. As a result, several students find it easier or more convenient to change majors when they feel overwhelmed by the requirements for engineering students, since they never really had a planned career path initially.

To address the above concerns, an additional project, the ‘Engineering your Future Project’ was recently added to the curriculum for the College Institute ES 100 taught to 12th graders at Thomas S. Wootton High School in Rockville, Maryland. This project involves motivating students to develop an academic map/career plan for themselves by observing and interviewing successful engineers in different fields, creating overview profiles for each of them, and studying these profiles to determine how they connect with their career intentions.

A detailed explanation of the Engineering your Future Project and how it fits into the ES 100 curriculum is given in this paper. Results from qualitative and quantitative evaluation of the project will be presented. In addition, since the project was also added to one of the ES 100 sections taught to Montgomery College students, the outcomes of the project for the college students and the high school students will be compared in this paper.

Introduction

The College Institute was created through a partnership between Montgomery College and Montgomery County, Maryland, Public Schools as a means of providing outstanding high school students with an opportunity to not only be taught college-level courses as part of their high school curriculum, but also to earn up to thirty (30) college credits in the environment of their own school buildings. Advantages of this program to participants include the possibility of the several of the courses to count towards a college degree or satisfy some pre-requisite requirement (depending on the institution attended by the student and his/her major), enhancement of the student’s college admissions profile, and motivation for early career decision making by student. In order to be accepted into the College Institute, students must: ≠ be enrolled as seniors at participating schools

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Kehnemouyi, M., & Abanulo, U. (2009, June), Engineering Your Future Project For High School Students Paper presented at 2009 Annual Conference & Exposition, Austin, Texas. 10.18260/1-2--5046