Tour of Engineering Summer Camp for Rising 8th and 9th Graders

Engineering is an amazing, challenging, and very broad field. It is divided into several disciplines and sub-disciplines. According to typesofengineeringdegrees.org, there are up to 40 different engineering degrees. Several sources, including US News and Wired Cosmos, state that there are not enough engineers in the United States to meet the market demand in the majority of these disciplines. How can we attract more students into engineering fields? Expose students to engineering early in their education. This paper focuses on “The Tour of Engineering” which is one class at a summer science program for rising 8 and 9 graders at the South Carolina Governor’s School for Science and Mathematics. It describes the preparation, execution, student perceptions, and learning outcomes for a week-long (30 hour) class. This class exposed students to the world of engineering by doing hands on activities and learn about different types of engineering, improve problem solving and goal setting skills through team-building exercises, and self-assessments. The activities could be accomplished separately or progressively integrated into a final product. This allowed students to experience the challenges of early decisions in the design process constraining later choices. This paper will present both quantitative and qualitative results of the engineering summer class with recommendations for future activities.