Using Information Technology To Facilitate Accessible Engineering Outreach On A National Scale

This paper presents a description and comprehensive assessment of the West Point Bridge Design Contest—a nationwide, Internet-based competition that has provided an engaging introductory engineering experience to over 40,000 high-school and middle-school students in the past three years. We begin by discussing how existing national engineering competitions have influenced the development of our contest infrastructure—a specially developed simulation software package and a web-based judging system. We briefly describe the implementation of the contest and present a comprehensive assessment of the extent to which it is accomplishing its goals. The assessment results serve as the basis for conclusions about the viability of IT-enabled engineering outreach.