(135f) Experimental Outreach Activities to Educate High School Students and Attract Them to the Engineering Profession

This work describes two outreach activities for high school students conducted to (1) educate them about the subject of the experiment and (2) attract them to the engineering profession. The first activity is an experiment to determine the viscosity of water using a simple tank tube viscometer. Based on a survey conducted during the outreach activity, the students' short term interest in chemical engineering increased by 95-230%. The second activity is an NSF-funded (DMR-0404278) effort that includes an outreach component to expose high school students to nanotechnology. The authors used the ?Exploring the Nanoworld? kit provided by the Institute for Chemical Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison as well as other materials to conduct the activity. The authors will describe the results of the outreach activities at several schools and suggest improvements for future activities.