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Opportunities for Engineering Educators through Participation

Outreach Activities

Abstract While community outreach programs and recruiting campaigns are common to all engineering programs, engineering educators often overlook opportunities for professional development found through participating in these activities. For example, an engineering educator might volunteer as a judge for a local science fair competition, serve as a mentor for a community improvement project, and maintain the more traditional activities of teaching and research in engineering classroom, yet participate in each activity as a separate event instead of incorporating these programs and activities to other areas of application. Our paper examines the opportunities to forge connections between college outreach programs and the processes of “continuous improvement” as professional engineering educators through the example of one such program in our own institution.

Our experiences with the 2007 Canstruction® competition are included as a model applicable to multiple concepts of civil engineering courses. We begin by discussing the “live” characteristics of value found in the Canstruction® project including the preparatory requirements, participants involved, and the competition’s overall contribution to engineering education. We then discuss the “dormant” opportunities for civil engineering students and educators to use links between programs such as the Canstruction® project and existing curricular content such as promoting multi-level mentorship and “real-time” problem solving activities.

Additional advantages of such links include opportunities for expanding instructional methods and addressing critical crossover areas of the revised Criteria for Accrediting Engineering Programs (ABET )1. Throughout our discussion, we also share our experiences with related pedagogical theories and instructional strategies for customizing similar programs in existing undergraduate engineering courses. More specifically, we explore areas for engineering students and educators to engage in life-long learning experiences through participation in such programs.

Introduction

Despite the increasing number of community outreach and recruiting programs in most engineering programs, engineering educators often overlook multiple opportunities to emphasize curricular areas of alignment with existing undergraduate engineering courses. The purpose of this paper is to examine methods of forging more explicitly defined connections between course- level engineering content and learning opportunities and these community outreach and K-12 programs. More specifically, we explore areas for engineering students and educators to engage in life-long learning experiences through participation in such programs.

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Ivey, S., & Lambert, A., & Palazolo, P., & Russomanno, D. J. (2008, June), Opportunities For Engineering Educators Through Participation Outreach Activities Paper presented at 2008 Annual Conference & Exposition, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. 10.18260/1-2--4075