Introduction To Engineering Course High School Partnership

Abstract NOTE: The first page of text has been automatically extracted and included below in lieu of an abstract Session 2793 Introduction to Engineering Course – High School Partnership Taryn Melkus Bayles Department of Chemical and Biochemical Engineering University of Maryland Baltimore County Introduction UMBC has undertaken three major initiatives to improve engineering education and awareness. The first initiative was to develop and present a three-day summer workshop to introduce high school teachers and counselors to the field of engineering. The second initiative was to revamp the Introduction to Engineering Course (ENES 101) to include hands-on project based inquiry experience, in which the students are required to research, design, construct, test, model, evaluate, and report on a specified product. The revised ENES 101 course was presented and discussed during a summer workshop, which lead to the faculty at Eastern Technical High School’s request for the development of a formal partnership (the third initiative) with UMBC to teach the equivalent of the ENES 101 course in the high school environment. It is not the intent of the partnership to be a recruiting tool for UMBC, but rather to expose high school students to a college level introductory engineering course. Background The high school level Introduction to Engineering course was developed based on the interest and ideas that emerged from a workshop conducted at UMBC in July 2001. The objective of the workshop was to better equip high school teachers and counselors to identify, guide, and prepare prospective students at each of their schools for a career in engineering. The three-day workshop was developed and presented by UMBC faculty from the College of Engineering and was modeled after work done by Raymond Landis1, former Dean of Engineering and Technology at California State University, Los Angeles. Invitations to the workshop with a brochure and application form were sent to area high schools in Maryland. Each participant received a 150 stipend, meals, and Maryland State Department of Education (MSDE) continuing education credits. The workshop was sponsored by a grant from the University System of Maryland through their K-16 Disciplinary Alliance and matching funds from UMBC’s College of Engineering (COE). Twenty-eight mathematics, technology, and science high school teachers and counselors attended and explored the spectrum and reach of engineering in society. The following topics were covered during the workshop: • An introduction to the broad field of engineering “Proceedings of the 2003 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright ©2003, American Society for Engineering Education”