RAMP: Summer Bridge Program for Female High School Students

RAMP is a six-week, summer bridge program at our institute to help students explore STEM careers and navigate the transition from high school to higher education. Over the past several years, RAMP has helped introduce over 150 youth to college life by connecting them with peers, enabling them to participate in skills-based workshops and hands-on projects, connecting them to alumni and other industry mentors, and helping them to become immersed in campus life prior to the start of their freshman year of college. In recently two years, more women students are recruited to the program, a unique mini program “RAMP for High School Girls is designed. The objective for this program is to expose students to various STEM disciplines. The six-week mini RAMP program is organized as modules. Each week the female students explore a different STEM discipline. The Mechanical and Electrical modules are presented in this paper. An entrance survey and an exit survey were conducted to collect data right before and after students completed the projects to evaluate the content of the workshops. 32 rising juniors/senior female high school students participated in the RAMP for High School Girls program in the past two years. The survey shows 6.25% students knew some/a lot about Electrical Engineering in the entrance survey, while 56.25% of the students knew some/a lot about Electrical Engineering in the exit survey. 6.25% students thought they knew some/a lot about Mechanical before the workshop, and 56.25% students thought they knew some/a lot about Mechanical Engineering after the workshop. Students reflected that they enjoyed the experience very much and found the workshops to be extremely helpful in helping them to further identify their college interests and majors. Introduction/Background Nowadays, more and more scientists, engineers and innovators are needed to succeed in the global competitive economy environment. As a result, this requires quality science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education. However, few American students pursue education and training in the STEM fields. After noticing this challenge, the whole STEM society has made great efforts to increase STEM-related activities, which have the potential to promote collaborative learning and inquiry as well as to contribute to the development of the 21st century skills . The US government also realized the shortage of STEM workforces. It initiated the “Educate to Innovate” program to increase student participation in all STEM-related activities. The ultimate objective of these activities is to encourage more students to choose an education in the STEM fields and pursue a STEM-related career in the future . Getting more students involved in the STEM education is already a challenge. Attracting more female students into the STEM fields can be even harder. Statistics data show that there is a big gender gap in the STEM fields in workplaces. It has been found that women make up 46% of the workforce but hold only 24% of jobs in STEM fields . Many institutions and organizations have realized this challenge and provided various activities to promote female students into the STEM fields . In addition, different strategies were developed to recruit and retain students in the STEM education . Creating quality, attractive STEM programs [6] and using peer influence to motivate high school girls into the STEM fields [7-8] appears to be effective ways to retain female students in STEM. Since 2011 our institute has begun to organize a six-week summer bridge program targeted to incoming freshmen from the city school system to help them smoothly transit from high school to college. In recent years rising juniors/seniors are invited to the program too. More female students have participated in the program since 2016, and most of them are rising juniors/seniors. A mini program "RAMP for High School Girls" is then created to expose high school girls to STEM fields. They not only participate in regular RAMP program, but also spend four hours a week, six weeks to participate in the mini program "RAMP for High School Girls". The main goal of the mini program is to expose female students to various STEM disciplines. Therefore, the mini program is organized as modules. There are 6 different modules: Biomedical, Civil, Electrical, Mechanical Engineering, Computer Science, and Industrial Design. The high school girls explore all 6 STEM/Design modules over six weeks. Each week, they explore a different STEM workshop for two hours per day and twice a week. These workshops are conducted by faculty from different departments. In each workshop, besides overviewing the field and major, faculty’s own experience in the field and teaching, career options within major/field, hands-on activities are also introduced to the students. This paper describes our experience of conducting the mini RAMP program to expose/attract high-school girls into the STEM fields. This paper presents our study with the Mechanical and Electrical workshops, including preparation, implementation, survey data, observations, and findings. Workshop Implementation Laboratory exercises play an important role in engineering education . They provide the opportunity for students to work on modern machines, tools used in industry . Therefore, in our workshops, we focus on hands on activity using modern machines and tools.