Introducing High School Students to Engineering Disciplines: Activities and Assessment

Abstract

Pre-college summer camps are part of the successful recruiting efforts at Missouri S&T; The undergraduate enrollment at Missouri S&T has increased 23% in the past 10 years. This paper documents and describes the educational summer camp program developed for high school students. The overarching, broader impact goal of the summer camp is to introduce students to various engineering disciplines and help them to make a better decision on choosing a career or discipline within engineering. Several activities are designed to achieve the goal. The summer camp attracts about 300 to 400 high school students across the country every summer. This research study focuses on the hands-on activities offered by Missouri S&T, College of Engineering and Computer Science programs. Activity details in the Civil Engineering, Architectural Engineering and Environmental Engineering programs are described in this paper and the results are discussed. Students showed success in implementing the engineering principles into basic engineering problems through a problem-based learning activity. Students enjoyed the activities and showed improved learning after the hands-on program. A survey is also conducted at the end of the activity to understand the students' perception of the conducted activities and to enhance the program based on students feedback. Overall the summer camp was very positive for both the participants and their mentors.

Meeting Name

2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference (2020: Jun. 22-26, Virtual)

Department(s)

Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering

Keywords and Phrases

High school students; Intro to Engineering; Problem based learning; Summer camp

International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)

2153-5965

Document Type

Article - Conference proceedings

Document Version

Citation

File Type

text

Language(s)

English

Rights

© 2020 American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE), All rights reserved.

Publication Date

22 Jun 2020

Link to Full Text

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