Developing an impactful 2-week audio engineering crash course for middle school students

Engineering has always been a troubling topic for attracting and retaining adolescent students. And with the constant presence of technology, teaching any form of engineering today can be even harder with the accessibility of such external stimuli. This talk aims to describe how a conglomerate of middle school students from around the world, each one uniquely diverse from their peers, came together at Duke University’s Pre College program to study audio engineering. In this one and half week crash course, students had the ability to build and understand their very own simple loudspeaker constructed from basic components. This class covered the fundamentals of sound propagation in air, electroacoustic devices, architectural acoustics, audio engineering, amplifier operation, and loudspeaker design. Students used the on-campus 3-D-printing facility to fabricate their own loudspeaker frame, hand-coiled the voice coil of the loudspeaker, and learned how breadboards operated to build a small amplifier. This hybrid class incorporated a mixture of lecture and laboratory time to effectively convey audio engineering to middle school students and resulted in each one successfully building their own stereo pair of loudspeakers.