Enticing High School Students Into Engineering Technology With A Simple Industrial Process Control Module

Too few high school students understand that a career in Engineering and Engineering Technology can genuinely be exciting and neat. Some have the short-term view that good paying jobs are plentiful, so why take the really difficult courses. Many sell their own abilities short and convince themselves that it is too difficult a career path. And still others conjure up the image of a dirty, dull, dangerous, and demeaning factory floor and run (not walk) in the other direction. What is needed to turn these impressions around are exciting exposures to engineering topics in existing high school courses such as technology education, science, math and physics. The purpose of this paper is to identify exactly one such exciting module that has been successfully used to build bridges that link high school students to an engineering career path.