An Outreach Effort The Connections Program

The School of Engineering within The Catholic University of America (CUA) has an aff iliation with the local high schools in the Washington DC area whose goal is to stimul a e interest in engineering among high sc ool students. There are currently 14 participating high schools, many of which include a student population with high minority and female enro llment (two of the sc hools are all-girls). As part of this initiative, CUA is currently funded by the National Science Foundation on a 4 year proj ect called "The Connections Program". Through this program, the aff iliated high schools have access to the computing fac ilities of the University. This includes Internet access, use of CUA's scientific applications (e.g., math and science related applications such as Matlab and Mathematica), and on-line library catalog access. A crucial part of the project is multi-tiered training. An ethics statement and fair usage policy has been drafted to ensure that the provided resources will be used in the appropri ate fashion.