Introduce Engineering to 6th Graders via “Speed Dating”

The School of Engineering at Penn State Erie, The Behrend College offers several outreach programs to the P-12 community impacting more than a 1000 students over the past year. The goal of this paper is to describe the presentation and implementation of a unique outreach program specially designed for sixth grade students. The program incorporated hands-on activities from all the engineering majors offered at this school into a fun interactive day within a limited amount of time. This paper will provide the details of each workshop as well as results from the assessment surveys given to the students and the teachers at the end of the program. Workshops were designed to be hands-on and focus on either computer, software, electrical, mechanical or plastics engineering. Topics covered included binary math, electrical circuits, boat design, the properties of plastic materials and bridge designs. The event was sponsored by a local company through an Educational Improvement Tax Credit program. They presented a workshop on the properties and uses of magnets which is the specialty of this particular company. One hundred and twenty-eight sixth grade students from three different elementary schools participated in this program. The challenge was to design a program for a large number of attendees and still showcase the engineering majors mentioned above to every single participant within a time duration of 3 hours. A distinctive feature of this event was how the workshops lasted for a short duration and still managed to be fun and interactive. Students were divided into groups of 11-12 and were rotated through the activities every 15 minutes. This paper will detail the program and each of the activities. The paper will be concluded with results from surveys taken from participants as well as teachers at the end of the event.