(539h) How to Organize and Implement an Outreach Day to Excite, Engage, and Educate Middle School Students about Engineering

Although young children seem to have an inherent desire to explore STEM activities, most students lose interest in pursuing a career in these fields in middle school. Exposing students to STEM experiences in middle school, and even earlier, can have a positive impact on their choice of career in the future. With the growing workforce demand for STEM professionals, it is important to reach children at this critical juncture in their development. One reason for lack of interest is that most students do not have a good understanding of what engineers actually do. Since the petrochemical industry has such a large presence in Louisiana, students who do know a little about engineering lack awareness of the wide variety of disciplines within this large field. Many of these middle school students believe that an engineer can only get a job working in the petrochemical industry, resulting in missed opportunities to recruit promising students with interests in human health and the environment. In an effort to address this need, the authors have developed an outreach day (ENGage LSU) that incorporated hands-on learning activities from a range of engineering disciplines including chemical, biological, mechanical, electrical, and environmental engineering. A hallmark of this outreach day is that all of the activities focused on bioengineering and nanoengineering with applications to clean energy and water, tissue engineering, disease diagnostics, and the development of new materials. The program has been offered three times during the spring semester in 2017, 2018, and 2019. In each year, the number of attendees has increased from ~90 students to ~200 students. To accommodate these numbers the program has increased the number of junior faculty members who give the demonstrations from 11 to 16. The majority (83%) of the middle school students come from traditionally underrepresented minorities so this outreach day is a unique opportunity for them to learn more about different fields of engineering. Using pre- and post-survey we observed a significant increase in (i) the number of students who had the confidence to become an engineer, (ii) the number of students who knew what biomedical engineering was, and (iii) that engineers could help doctors diagnose and treat patients. This presentation will provide details on how the program was designed and improved to maximize the impact on the middle schools and increase their excitement about one-day enrolling in a STEM discipline.