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Session 1566

Linking College Engineering Courses With High School Preparation

Donald L. Goddard PhD PE

The University of Texas at Tyler

Abstract

A Report titled “Expanding the Technology Workforce”1 prepared by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board found that : “…Texas Students are not being sufficiently informed nor prepared for some of the most interesting, challenging, and lucrative careers in the new economy”1 “The recruitment of top quality high school students to the engineering profession is an area which needs to be pursued…”1. The insufficiency noted in the above referenced report, which can be best directly addressed by colleges of engineering, is the matter of informing the students at the high school and junior high school. Many of these students have a bright interest in science but no goal or realistic grasp of what they would do with what they learn in high school science courses, even though the courses are available to them. Since those courses are often the more demanding, motivation is highly important. This paper presents the methods used at UT Tyler to address this problem. These methods integrate a component into junior and senior level design courses that places the college engineering students in high school classrooms. There, these students then explain actual engineering design projects and the field of engineering to students who can be motivated and recruited to the engineering profession.

I. Background

An electronic search was performed at the web page “Search the Journal Engineering Education Database” which allows searching for articles in the ASEE Journal of Engineering Education. The search was executed using the search words “high school” and yielded 128 “hits”. Amazingly, in the entire 128 hits not a single paper had the term “high school” in the title. I assert that this is amazing because of the number of my colleagues who complain about the quality and quantity of students coming into our programs, how ill prepared these students are, and how uninformed they are about engineering. These concerns barely address the matter of the students who might have come into engineering and did not because they had no idea what it really was. This experience in searching the database only adds to my conviction that there is a neglected area in which engineering educators can be acting, where they are received warmly, and where they are able to enhance the lives and learning of both their current and future

Proceedings of the 2001 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright  2001, American Society for Engineering Education

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Goddard, D. (2001, June), Linking College Engineering Courses With High School Preparation Paper presented at 2001 Annual Conference, Albuquerque, New Mexico. 10.18260/1-2--9517