(32e) Bringing Outreach Into the Engineering Classroom – A Heat and Mass Transfer Student Class Project

One major contributing factor to the low number of students receiving degrees in engineering is the two decades of steady decline in the number of students enrolling in engineering disciplines. While engineering undergraduate enrolment across the US has seen recent increase due to the current global recession highlighting the apparent stability of engineering jobs, the US is still projected to face a shortage of up to 70,000 engineers by 2010. Recent surveys by the American Society for Quality (ASQ) and the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) suggest that this shortage and decline in engineering enrollment is linked to K-12 students' lack of knowledge of engineering careers and their perception of engineering as ?boring? or just for geeks. The NAE study further concluded that though many engineering organizations have put money and effort to this image problem, their efforts have had little impact in changing the public image of engineering (NAE book). Overall, what is clear from the literature is that boosting enrollment and increasing the number of graduates in engineering is one key parameter in keeping the US competitive in the global economy of the 21st century and beyond. Thus, additional effort needs to be put into making the new generation of K-12 students aware of the engineering profession and its versatile contribution to solving the many critical global issues. This paper present a different approach to introducing chemical engineering to K-12 student involving the chemical engineering classroom and a science fair style presentation to local high school students. Specifically, students enrolled in the ?Mass and Heat Transfer? chemical engineering (ChE) course at the University of Michigan in groups of 5 were asked to design and present one original experiment suitable for a high school teacher to use in introducing a basic heat or mass transfer concept of their choice to his or her high school science class. ChE students were given a $25 budget to build their experiments and local high school students from the Ypsilanti school districts were invited into the classroom to experience and judge the design outcome on its ability to engage their interest in engineering as a career choice. My talk will discuss the benefit and success of this ?each-one-teach-one? approach to K-12 outreach and suggest how this can be replicated in other ChE courses.