scholarly journals DISCOVERE: AN OUTREACH PROGRAM AT THE SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING

Author(s):  
Yang Cao ◽  
Seach Chyr Goh ◽  
Ahmad Rteil ◽  
Deborah Roberts ◽  
Kevin Golovin

Canadian universities are devoting more and more resources to develop K-12 engineering education outreach programs. The School of Engineering at the University of British Columbia’s Okanagan campus offers a variety of outreach and community programs for students of all ages. This paper provides details on the DiscoverE Engineering Summer Program which has been delivered since 2016. The objective of the program is to introduce students general design processes through hands-on civil, electrical, and mechanical engineering projects. The overall goal is to foster a passion in engineering and at the same time attract students who have already had an interest in engineering and are eager to learn more about the discipline. The program is taught by faculty members and exposes students to a variety of hands-on projects in civil, electrical and mechanical engineering. This paper will provide curriculum details for each topic and reflect on the student learning experience based on observations. Future qualitative plans on the measure of the impact of this program qualitatively will be explored.  

2013 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 92-110 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Passoneau ◽  
Michele Christian

What can researchers do when they want to transform a traditional lecture into a collaborative, hands-on learning experience? How can participants learn and become empowered to construct and maintain historical records that reflect their experiences? An archivist can lecture students about basic archival practices and the students can learn a few skills, but hands-on activities for record creation and maintenance that facilitate participants’ learning will create collaborators with basic, but important, archival skills.At Iowa State University (ISU), the University Archivist and the Assessment Librarian partnered to create an educational outreach program with Greek (fraternity and sorority) students and alumni.


Author(s):  
A Gonzalez-Buelga ◽  
I Renaud-Assemat ◽  
B Selwyn ◽  
J Ross ◽  
I Lazar

This paper focuses on the development, delivery and preliminary impact analysis of an engineering Work Experience Week (WEW) programme for KS4 students in the School of Civil, Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering (CAME) at the University of Bristol, UK. Key stage 4, is the legal term for the two years of school education which incorporate GCSEs in England, age 15–16. The programme aims to promote the engineering profession among secondary school pupils. During the WEW, participants worked as engineering researchers: working in teams, they had to tackle a challenging engineering design problem. The experience included hands-on activities and the use of state-of-the-art rapid prototyping and advanced testing equipment. The students were supervised by a group of team leaders, a diverse group of undergraduate and postgraduate engineering students, technical staff, and academics at the School of CAME. The vision of the WEW programme is to transmit the message that everybody can be an engineer, that there are plenty of different routes into engineering that can be taken depending on pupils’ strengths and interests and that there are a vast amount of different engineering careers and challenges to be tackled by the engineers of the future. Feedback from the participants in the scheme has been overwhelmingly positive.


Author(s):  
A J Shaw ◽  
T G Harrison ◽  
K L Shallcross ◽  
S J Williams ◽  
D E Shallcross

Analysis of the average number of applicants received from schools that engaged in the Bristol ChemLabS Outreach program prior to a student‟s application with those that did not engage, shows a significant increase in applicants from engaged schools. The significance is weaker when just Post 16 students are considered but this is almost certainly due to a smaller sample size. When this analysis was inspected in terms of the distance of the school from the University of Bristol, there was an increase in the number of applicants from engaged schools irrespective of distance. However, a statistically significant increase was observed for schools within 50 miles of the University from an analysis of just Post 16 students. Students who applied to the department from an engaged school were more likely to accept an offer and also to make the department their firm acceptance. A slightly higher number of applications that were rejected came from engaged schools too. There are two possible reasons; first, the engagement may have encouraged more students who did not have the required entry qualifications. Second, during the period of analysis, the overall entry grades went up by one grade each year. Such a dramatic rise was probably the reason for the slightly elevated numbers.


2022 ◽  
pp. 271-289
Author(s):  
Violeta Meneses Carvalho ◽  
Cristina S. Rodrigues ◽  
Rui A. Lima ◽  
Graça Minas ◽  
Senhorinha F. C. F. Teixeira

Engineering education is a challenging topic that has been deeply explored in order to provide better educational experiences to engineering students, and the learning by doing approach has been appraised. Amidst a global pandemic, an engineering summer program denominated i9Masks emerged and aimed to create transparent facial masks for preventing the virus spreading. This project had the participation of 21 students from different engineering areas, as well as professors and monitors whose guidance and commitment were of great importance for its success. Aiming to understand the importance of this engineering hands-on project for students' training, two inquiries were applied, being one for students and the other for professors and monitors/researchers. Students described this initiative as an amazing and innovative experience that they would like to repeat and considered useful for their careers. Regarding the impact perceived by the teaching staff, the results proved that they enjoyed participating in the i9MASKS project and sharing knowledge with students in a practical way.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (12) ◽  
pp. 353
Author(s):  
Shaya Wolf ◽  
Andrea Carneal Burrows ◽  
Mike Borowczak ◽  
Mason Johnson ◽  
Rafer Cooley ◽  
...  

Research on innovative, integrated outreach programs guided three separate week-long outreach camps held across two summers (2018 and 2019). These camps introduced computer science through real-world applications and hands-on activities, each dealing with cybersecurity principles. The camps utilized low-cost hardware and free software to provide a total of 84 students (aged 10 to 18 years) a unique learning experience. Based on feedback from the 2018 camp, a new pre/post survey was developed to assess changes in participant knowledge and interest. Student participants in the 2019 iteration showed drastic changes in their cybersecurity content recall (33% pre vs. 96% post), cybersecurity concept identification within real-world scenarios, and exhibited an increased ability to recognize potential cybersecurity threats in their every-day lives (22% pre vs. 69% post). Finally, students’ self-reported interest-level before and after the camp show a positive increase across all student participants, with the number of students who where highly interested in cybersecurity more than doubling from 31% pre-camp to 65% post-camp. Implications for educators are large as these activities and experiences can be interwoven into traditional schooling as well as less formal camps as pure computer science or through integrated STEM.


2001 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 249-252 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clinton S. Potter ◽  
Bridget Carragher ◽  
Liana Carroll ◽  
Charles Conway ◽  
Benjamin Grosser ◽  
...  

AbstractThe Bugscope project is an educational outreach program for kindergarten to grade 12 (K–12) classrooms. The project provides a resource to classrooms so that they may remotely operate a scanning electron microscope to image insects at high magnification. The microscope is remotely controlled in real time from a classroom computer over the Internet using a Web browser. Bugscope provides a state-of-the-art microscope resource for teachers that can be readily integrated into classroom activities. The Bugscope project provides a low-cost, sustainable model for research groups to support K–12 education outreach projects.


2018 ◽  
Vol 79 (4) ◽  
pp. 170-175 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica Bertrand ◽  
Alison Crerar ◽  
Janis Randall Simpson

The impact of a hands-on foods course on undergraduate students’ food skills was examined at the University of Guelph. For a convenience sample, first- and second-year students (n = 47, 87% female) registered in the “Understanding Foods” course were recruited to participate in a survey administered on Qualtrics at the beginning of the semester and again at the end of the semester. Participants were asked questions related to demographics and food habits; additional questions on food skills, in Likert-scale format, included confidence in food preparation, food safety knowledge, and grocery shopping habits. Subscales were combined for an overall Food Skills Questions (FSQ) score and differences were determined by paired t tests. Overall, significant (P < 0.05) improvements were observed related to students’ confidence and food safety knowledge scores as well as the overall FSQ score. Students, however, rated their personal eating habits more poorly (P < 0.05) at the end of the semester. As a lack of food skills is often considered a barrier for healthy eating among students, these results signify the importance of a hands-on introductory cooking course at the undergraduate level.


Author(s):  
Zahed Siddique ◽  
Mrinal C. Saha ◽  
Firas Akasheh ◽  
Shaiful Arif ◽  
Bipul Barua ◽  
...  

It is well documented that students learn more effectively when they are actively involved in the learning process, and interacting with peers. Interactive scenario-based education is a novel concept expected to stimulate active learning and provide a peer-learning experience. In this paper we present Create your Scenario Interactively (CSI) module, which is an interactive storybook-like learning tool composed of interactive storyline, 2D/3D visualization, simulation, and state-of-the-art interaction technology. The CSI method allows peer-interactions and prepares students to solve open-ended problems. The CSI module has been developed for metal casting and implemented in manufacturing engineering courses at the University of Oklahoma and Tuskegee University. In this paper, we discuss the impact of the CSI on students’ learning in manufacturing engineering education. Our preliminary results suggest that a majority of the students feels that the CSI module is very effective in keeping them engaged. We also analyze the effect of peer-learning to develop critical thinking and solve design problems. The details of the CSI module, implementation details, and assessment results are discussed in the paper.


Author(s):  
Aaron Kennedy ◽  
Aaron Scott ◽  
Nicole Loeb ◽  
Alec Sczepanski ◽  
Kaela Lucke ◽  
...  

AbstractHarsh winters and hazards such as blizzards are synonymous with the northern Great Plains of the United States. Studying these events is difficult; the juxtaposition of cold temperatures and high winds makes microphysical observations of both blowing and falling snow challenging. Historically, these observations have been provided by costly hydrometeor imagers that have been deployed for field campaigns or at select observation sites. This has slowed the development and validation of microphysics parameterizations and remote-sensing retrievals of various properties. If cheaper, more mobile instrumentation can be developed, this progress can be accelerated. Further, lowering price barriers can make deployment of instrumentation feasible for education and outreach purposes.The Blowing Snow Observations at the University of North Dakota: Education through Research (BLOWN-UNDER) Campaign took place during the winter of 2019-2020 to investigate strategies for obtaining microphysical measurements in the harsh North Dakota winter. Student led, the project blended education, outreach, and scientific objectives. While a variety of in-situ and remote-sensing instruments were deployed for the campaign, the most novel aspect of the project was the development and deployment of OSCRE, the Open Snowflake Camera for Research and Education. Images from this instrument were combined with winter weather educational modules to describe properties of snow to the public, K-12 students, and members of indigenous communities through a tribal outreach program. Along with an educational deployment of a Doppler on Wheels mobile radar, nearly 1000 individuals were reached during the project.


2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (40) ◽  
pp. 193-206
Author(s):  
Usha Vellappan ◽  
Liyen Lim

The incorporation of information technology in education has benefitted learning institutions, instructors as well as students in coping with how knowledge can be transferred, absorbed, and used in the context of teaching and learning. The flipped classroom has been used to maximize the in-class time with discussions and critical thinking activities and leaves the learning to the students prior to the in-class sessions which were considered difficult to be implemented in a traditional classroom setting. The aim of this study is to explore students’ learning experiences with the implementation of flipped classroom approach. This study presents 96 business program students’ experiences of incorporating flipped classroom approach in a web designing course at the university level. Both quantitative and qualitative questionnaire was used to collect data for this study. The findings of the study showed that students responded positively to this approach. Students expressed that they are able to learn better and be more prepared to attend face-to-face classes. They appreciated that they were given the freedom to take charge of their individual learning. The hands-on nature of the course made flipped classroom favorable because students are able to apply their knowledge immediately by using the self-check questions after viewing the videos and progress to more complex applications during the in-class sessions. Students welcomed such an approach to be used in other hands-on or practical courses. However, there are still areas of concern and challenges for both students and instructors that need to be looked into when incorporating the flipped classroom model.


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