(75g) Young Engineers & Scientists Seminars: a High School Enrichment Program

YESS (Young Engineers and Scientists Seminars http://www.yesshem.com) is an enrichment program for gifted and talented high school students from the Baltimore/Washington area who have a strong aptitude in mathematics and science fields. Letters are sent to Science, Mathematics, Technology and Engineering High School teachers asking them to nominate students for participation in the program. This program was founded in 2002 and is funded by the Historical Electronics Museum with a grant from Northrop Grumman. YESS has presented speakers on topics as diverse as plasma physics, stealth radar, biomedical imagery, super computers/micro technology, aeronautical engineering, astrophysics and satellite reconnaissance.

In 2004, the program was revised from a strictly seminar series, to a hands-on program designed to help students understand the engineering design process. Two-hour sessions are held biweekly and the students work in teams and learn how to go from brainstorming to designing, modeling, building, testing and evaluation. In 2004 the hands-on inquiry based design project was to model and design a hot air balloon which had to meet specific size, cost, time aloft and payload criteria. In 2005 the hands-on inquiry based design project, was to design mousetrap vehicles which had to meet various design criteria, which included maximizing distance traveled, pulling capability, speed over a specified distance, and stopping ability at a specified distance. The YESS program is a miniature version of the Introduction to Engineering course at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. At each YESS session, the high school students learn engineering fundamentals that relate to their design project, followed by hands-on mini design challenges. The presentations given by technical experts have included: So You Want to be an Engineer, The Engineering Method, The Neutral Buoyancy Lab (2004), Materials Testing and Properties (2004), Vehicle Design (2005), Energy Transformation (2005), and Computer Modeling Techniques. The mini design challenges are related to different aspects of the over-arching design project and the teams compete for prizes provided by Northrop Grumman. At the final design project testing, scholarship awards are made to the top four teams of the final design competition. Since the revision of the YESS program the average attendance has gone from 32 students (2003) to 63 students (2004) and 75 students (2005).

A mini-grant from the NSF funded Conducting Rigorous Research Education: Creating a Community of Practice (DUE-0341127) has been received, and is being used to measure how the instruction of pre-college students in the engineering design process using project based learning with hands-on activities impacts engineering knowledge and decisions to study engineering. The students completed pre- and post-surveys measuring interest, attitude and knowledge of the engineering design process and the underlying principles associated with a successful design solution. In addition, each team is required to keep a design notebook to document the evolution of the final design. The results of these findings will be compiled and presented.